The Barbie Movie That Wasn't
I have a history of being not just wrong but phenomenally off when it comes to some of the biggest box office champions of all time.
I will never, forget, for example, walking out of 2001’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding and thinking, vividly, “What possible audience could there be for a movie with no movie stars and no conflict? Newcomer Nia Vardalos has come up with a real Vardaloser! The box office grosses for this will be anything but fat! I want a divorce!”
Yes, my inner voice sounded a lot like Gene Shalit for a number of years. I’m not sure why, nor will I apologize.
It turns out that the audience for such an endeavor was huge. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was at one point the top grossing American independent film of all time.
The movie I found so pointless and non-commercial has endured to the point where 2023 saw the final entry in the My Big Fat Greek Wedding trilogy although My Big Fat Greek Wedding’s paltry thirty nine million dollar gross, roughly one tenth the record-breaking total of the original, suggests that there wasn’t much of an audience left twenty two long years later.
I marched out of Avatar and similarly asked, out loud, “Who is going to want to see a shitty, three hour Dances with Wolves in space? That is going to be the biggest bomb of all time.”
I was wrong in the sense that Avatar was the biggest hit of all time rather than the biggest money loser the world of cinema would ever know.
On a similar note, when I first saw that the popular Mattel fashion doll Barbie was being turned into a movie my response was, “That sounds like a bad idea. If it gets made, which is a very big if, then it will be probably be very poorly received.”
This was, however, perhaps the one instance in which I was not, in fact, glaringly wrong.
That’s because the iteration of Barbie that I read about many years ago didn’t get made. Even in a world where the version of Barbie that did get made grossed one and a half billion dollars, was a massive pop culture phenomenon and was so rapturously received that people were angry that it only got eight Oscar nominations, and was snubbed for Best Director and Best Actress, I still think that the earlier Barbie would have flopped.
That’s because the earlier iteration of Barbie would have starred Amy Schumer and people hate Amy Schumer. Oh sweet blessed Lord do people hate Amy Schumer. They really, really hate Amy Schumer. They hate her so much that they make hating her a core component of their personality, as if that is somehow something to be proud of.
In 2016 Schumer signed on to star in Barbie and rewrite the screenplay with her sister. She left the following year, citing scheduling differences but last year she conceded that she left because of the proverbial creative differences with the producers.
If Schumer had starred as Barbie the minds of the Incels of the world would start blowing up, Scanners-style, in wildly misplaced rage at the choice. A furious, pointless, gross and wildly misogynist cultural conversation would ensue about whether Schumer is hot or fuckable enough to play a famously desirable children’s fashion doll and whether Schumer is, in fact, hot or fuckable in general. These conversations would happen online among terrible, terrible people.
This is obviously not something that would happen to a male actor who committed the unspeakable crime of accepting a role they might not be entirely right for but there’s something about Schumer’s persona that enrages a certain type of Pillsbury Doughboy-soft man-baby.
I’m sure change.org campaigns would be launched to replace Schumer in Barbie with a hotter actress. The Alt-Right would be in a nuclear-grade meltdown over what the Woke liberals had done to an American icon.
It wouldn’t matter whether the movie was any good or not: a disturbingly large percentage of the public, overwhelmingly but not exclusively male, would be predisposed to hate it with the proverbial white hot burning passion regardless.
Diablo Cody was a screenwriter on Barbie during its long, fraught gestation period. I read an interview with her where she said that her biggest hurdle involved making a post-modern, satirical comedy that alternates between the real world and a fictitious one created by a corporation that plays a central role in the proceedings that wasn’t overly derivative of The Lego Movie, a huge hit from a few years earlier.
By Cody’s own admission, she was flummoxed by the assignment and left over a half decade ago. She harbored no ill will over her departure although she did note that Barbie owes so much to The Lego Movie that it essentially cast Will Ferrell in identical roles as business-minded antagonists.
I wrote a whole article for Fatherly about Barbie’s debt to The Lego Movie. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. Everything builds upon everything else. That’s the nature of creativity. Heck, I’ve even heard people say that Oasis, my favorite band, is derivative or The Beatles, my other favorite band.
I personally do not hear it but apparently there is some resemblance.
I think it’s safe to say that the Amy Schumer Barbie would not have done as well as the one starring Margot Robbie. It probably would not have been nominated for any Academy Awards, let alone eight, including Best Picture.
Barbie was magic. It was the right movie at the right time with the right people and the right vibe.
It took some time to find the right alchemy but it was worth the wait.
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