The Big Picture
- Mattel’s plans to expand into the world of movies are filled with endless talk about turning every recognizable object into a film, without considering the deeper reasons for Barbie‘s success.
- Just like Hasbro’s failed attempts to turn its board games and toys into successful movies, Mattel must learn from past mistakes and avoid adapting properties that lack established characters or defined visual aesthetics.
- Mattel’s previous film endeavors have been unsuccessful, with many of its ambitious projects never getting off the ground. Trying to capitalize on Barbie‘s success by rushing into more adaptations will only lead to more storytelling issues and potential failures.
In anticipation of the then-upcoming release of Barbie, The New Yorker ran a piece on July 2, 2023 detailing Mattel’s plans for expanding further into the world of movies. Mattel had always harbored ambitions of making it big in Hollywood and had even attempted to turn those goals into a concrete reality in 2018 by starting up a movie division headed by producer Robbie Brenner. However, finally getting Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of its famous doll off the ground inspired this company to go even further with its big-screen dreams. Mattel wants to be the Marvel Studios of toy adaptations and, in an ideal world, have each of those projects attached to an A-list star.
If every trailer for Barbie inspires one with joy and excitement, this New Yorker piece about Mattel’s future cinematic exploits instantly fills one’s soul with dread. The piece is filled with endless talk about IP management and turning every possible recognizable object in the company’s history into a movie. There’s nary a hint of self-awareness of how a live-action Matchbox cars movie might be more of a creative stretch than hiring Greta Gerwig to handle a Barbie adaptation. It all reads as very dystopian, a corporation mistaking the idea of potential success with one adaptation as a signal that audiences are ready for a world where superhero movies get replaced by toy adaptation movies. But let’s hold the Hot Wheel cars and He-Man action figures for one second. Mattel, before things get out of hand, it’s time for an open plea: do not learn the wrong lessons from Barbie.
Mimicking What Worked Once Rarely Works Long-Term
In March 2010, James Cameron shouldn’t have had a care in the world. After all, Avatar had just shattered box office records and redefined the possibilities for what kinds of movies could open in the digital 3D format. But he was getting nervous about the future of digital 3D cinema now that every studio was trying to get in on the third dimension by hastily converting movies into the format. “After Toy Story, there were 10 really bad CG movies because everybody thought the success of that film was CG and not great characters that were beautifully designed and heartwarming,” Cameron warned Deadline at the time. The implication here was clear: it wasn’t enough to just slap the digital 3D label on a movie. You had to have more going on. 2010 movies like Clash of the Titans that rushed to cash in on the 3D trend didn’t heed the words of this master filmmaker.
Hollywood studios have a bad habit of just mimicking the shallowest interpretation of what made a big hit movie successful rather than considering the deeper intricacies of why a feature resonated with people. It’s clear Mattel is already hopping into this approach with all the hype surrounding Barbie. There are lots of reasons this specific toy adaptation has become a pop culture phenomenon with people, including the fact that it being the first live-action Barbie movie makes it feel extra special to people. There’s also been the dearth of female-skewing big-budget movies in 2023, which has also allowed Barbie to cater to an under-represented demographic. Meanwhile, the 2020s have seen a rise in “bimbo feminism”, a movement that emphasizes inclusive and often leftist ideology within high-femme fashion and sensibilities. People have been engaging in this style of feminism for a while before the cameras even began rolling on Barbie, but this movement coincided perfectly with the bright-pink aesthetic of Greta Gerwig’s feature.
None of that nuance or sociopolitical timing seems to have registered with Mattel executives if that New Yorker piece is any indication. Instead, the idea now is that Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots can totally become a motion picture property, ditto everything else in the Mattel library from Polly Pocket to the Magic 8 Ball. The New Yorker article even ends with an account of a writer being hired to try and crack the story of a potential Uno adaptation. Cameron’s warning of how people were misinterpreting the success of Avatar in digital 3D is now happening with Barbie as well. Mattel mistakenly thinks that throwing a toy adaptation on the big screen is enough to get audiences pumped when, in reality, it’s all a lot more complicated than that.
The strangest part about Mattel deciding that Barbie’s success means audiences want nothing but toy adaptations is that it’s following the very grave missteps of another toy company. Not so long ago, Mattel’s biggest rival saw a film adaptation of one of its toys turn into a pop culture phenomenon and, thus, embarked on plans to make a slew of features based on its various board games and action figures. At the time, it seemed like the perfect way to cash in on the success of 2007’s equivalent to Barbie. But just ask Hasbro…chasing the box office glory of Transformers didn’t work out well.
Heed the Failures of Hasbro
After Transformers became a huge hit, Hasbro signed a massive deal with Universal to produce a slew of film adaptations of its various board games, toys, and other properties. The first result of this deal was Battleship, one of the biggest box office bombs in history. The Universal/Hasbro deal went nowhere and Hasbro’s film ambitions quickly dwindled. In the years since, Hasbro has delivered a handful of further film adaptations (including the 2023 feature Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) but proposed projects based on Micronauts, M.A.S.K., and other Hasbro toylines have gone nowhere. Similarly, the team behind The LEGO Movie, a box office sensation in 2014, tried to turn that one movie into an expansive franchise delivering constant annual new installments. These plans fizzled out after The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part flopped hard in 2019.
The many problems faced by Hasbro in getting any of its films even made, let alone making movies people want to even see, should be an ominous sign for Mattel. Much like Hasbro, Mattel’s big first film success came from adapting its most famous toy line chock full of rich mythos and established characters (Optimus Prime and Bumblebee=Barbie and Ken) for a feature adaptation to draw from. Much like Mattel in a post-Barbie world, Hasbro then tried to reverse-engineer another major hit out of a slew of properties that are far more nebulously defined. An entire new mythology (which was as convoluted as it was derivative) needed to be established for a Battleship movie. Screenplays for potential Monopoly, Candyland, or Stretch Armstrong adaptations at Hasbro would also need to build these fictional worlds basically from the ground up.
These problems plaguing prospective Hasbro movies suggest the biggest issue Mattel has to face in its various adaptations: the company is adapting material that’s meant to be malleable. At least Barbie has a defined visual aesthetic (bright pink!) to build a movie out of. Hot Wheels can literally be anything and everything so that kids from all walks of life want to play with them. They’re just cars you can roll around on the floor, they’re innately streamlined objects. That’s perfect for a toy that can be placed in grocery store checkout lines across the world. It’s less perfect as the basis for a massive feature-length movie. That’s a lesson Hasbro learned the hard way in its endless forays into Hollywood and even the LEGO company had to learn that properties like Ninjago weren’t going to automatically print money as movies. Mattel needs to heed the past mistakes of other toy companies in its big-screen ambitions.
Mattel’s Already Struggled So Much as a Film Company
What makes Mattel’s gung-ho attitude toward turning every one of its properties into a major film extra strange is how it’s not like this is the first time it’s embraced the siren song of Hollywood. Back in the wake of Transformers hitting it big at the box office, Mattel also announced a slew of movies based on toys that were, in theory going to be massive box office juggernauts. A View-Master movie was on the table penned by Brad Caleb Kane, Paramount Pictures was preparing to turn Max Steel into a blockbuster event, while the first rumblings of a new Masters of the Universe feature hit the web just weeks before the original Transformers debuted on theaters. Meanwhile, news about Mattel’s Hot Wheels line getting adapted into a movie dates back to 2003, when McG was slated to direct the property.
Needless to say, none of these original ambitions ever went anywhere. The View-Master and Hot Wheels movies have remained unrealized while a live-action Masters of the Universe has traveled from one studio to the next, never capable of becoming a fully realized feature. Max Steel at least did end up getting a theatrically released movie, but it was a 2016 box office dud released by Open Road Films. Mattel has already traveled down the road of attaching high-profile talent and studios to film adaptations of its toy properties in an attempt to capitalize on the box office success of a movie based on a piece of plastic. It didn’t work out so well for the toy company circa. 2009 and the endless problems plaguing Masters of the Universe and Hot Wheels movies in the intervening years offer little hope that a post-Barbie attempt to engage in these exact same actions would result in anything different.
The other properties that Mattel wants to turn into movies, by and large, require so much heavy lifting to become narrative films that you might as well just make original motion pictures. The handful that do have expansive mythology, like Masters of the Universe, would cost way more than Barbie to make, rendering them financially unfeasible from the get-go. Mattel (and Hasbro for that matter) have always found it difficult to translate its various properties into major motion pictures. Forcing them into existence in the wake of Barbie’s box office success won’t suddenly erase all the innate storytelling issues plaguing any movie adaptation of the View-Master toy.
There are lots of good things studios and filmmakers should take away from Barbie resonating with audiences. Chiefly, big-budget movies aimed primarily at women aren’t automatic box office poison, while bright colors and campy sensibilities shouldn’t be viewed as qualities that will automatically deter moviegoers. Letting Ryan Gosling be sillier in more major movies would also be a good idea! Unfortunately, Hollywood always tends to learn the wrong lessons from big box office hits that tap into the pop culture zeitgeist. Undoubtedly, we’ll all have to sit through a bevy of lackluster motion pictures that try to mimic the success of Barbie in the most uninspired of ways. With any luck, though, Mattel can avoid being part of that inevitable trend. All it would take for them to learn correctly from Barbie is to pump the brakes on its avalanche of potential toy movie adaptations. Once these executives realize that people wanting to see Kenergy on the big screen isn’t also a sign that people are eager for a Matchbox cars movie, the future of a post-Barbie cinema landscape will look a lot more exciting.