Barbie currently stands as the highest-grossing movie of the year with $1.38 billion worldwide, but few imagined that the film would be that successful. According to an article from The New York Times, the original script for Barbie was 147 pages long and Mattel Films head Robbie Brenner didn’t quite know what to make of it.
“When the script did land in Ms. Brenner’s email, it was 147 pages — the length of a Quentin Tarantino film, epic by Hollywood standards,” reads the New York Times article. “She closed her office door and started reading. ‘It was like going on this crazy ride,’ she recalled. It broke rules, including the so-called fourth wall, addressing the audience directly. It poked fun at Mattel.”
However, Brenner knew Barbie was something special and immediately took it to Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz. “I’ve read a lot of scripts, and this is so different,” she told Kriez. “It’s special. You don’t get this feeling many times in an entire career.” After reading the Barbie script for himself, Kreiz agreed. “It was deep, provoking, unconventional and imaginative,” he said. “It was everything I was hoping it would be.“
Margot Robbie was one of the few who had a vision for how successful Barbie would become, as she actually predicted that it would gross $1 billion when she pitched it to the studio. “I think my pitch in the green-light meeting was the studios have prospered so much when they’re brave enough to pair a big idea with a visionary director,” Robbie said. “And then I gave a series of examples like, ‘dinosaurs and [Steven] Spielberg,’ that and that, that and that – pretty much naming anything that’s been incredible and made a ton of money for the studios over the years. And I was like, ‘And now you’ve got Barbie and Greta Gerwig.’ And I think I told them that it’d make a billion dollars, which maybe I was overselling, but we had a movie to make, okay?!“
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie features a star-studded cast which includes Margot Robbie as the title character and Ryan Gosling as Ken. When Barbie suddenly begins to worry about her own mortality, she goes on a journey of self-discovery to the real world, accompanied by a love-lorn Ken. Considering how well the film is doing, you can almost certainly expect a sequel to be announced once the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes have concluded, but it was revealed that neither Robbie, Gosling, or Gerwig have deals in place to return for a sequel. Barbie was released on Digital on September 5th.
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