Barbie is one of the hottest films of 2023, trouncing Indiana Jones and John Wick in just one week and already making a beeline for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the current box office leader. So it makes sense that Mattel and Warner Bros. are eager to make a sequel.
For now, though, the visionary director who brought the Mattel toy to life says she’s not on board.
Greta Gerwig, in an interview with the New York Times, downplayed the idea of Barbie as the next big franchise for the studio, despite its success.
“At this moment, it’s all I’ve got,” she said. “I feel like that at the end of every movie, like I’ll never have another idea and everything I’ve ever wanted to do, I did. I wouldn’t want to squash anybody else’s dream, but for me, at this moment, I’m at totally zero.”
Gerwig made history with Barbie, as the film broke records with $155 million at the box office. That’s the biggest opening weekend ever for a female director, beating Captain Marvel (which made $153 million in 2019 and was codirected by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck) and Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman ($103 million in 2017).
Mattel, of course, could opt to move Barbie movies forward without Gerwig. And, in fact, the company seems set to do so. Speaking with Variety, CEO Ynon Kreiz, whose idea it was to create a Mattel cinematic universe, strongly implied there are plenty more stories to tell.
“Barbie, as a brand, has many different iterations,” he said. The product lines of Barbie is a very broad brand. In addition to the main Barbie figure, she has family, she has a lot of elements around in her universe. It’s a very rich universe…It’s a very broad and very elastic brand, in terms of opportunities…At the outset, we’re not saying, ‘Okay, let’s think already about movie two and three.’ Let’s get the first one right and make that a success. And if you do that, opportunities open up very quickly, once you establish the first movie as a successful representation of a franchise on the big screen.”
Mattel’s not stopping with Barbie. The toymaker has films in various stages of development for 14 of its lines, including Barney, Polly Pocket, Thomas & Friends, and American Girl.