Mattel has never been so innately involved in the mainstream public’s consciousness as it has been as of 2023 because of its showstopper phenomenon: Barbie. Helmed by the equally iconic sensation of our era, Margot Robbie, the film seeks to launch the doll into the peripheries of global recognition, even for those who have never bothered with the toy line or expressed a genuine disinterest in the subject of Barbies ever since childhood.
As an early intro into the world of pink tells us, the narrative is not as simple as it seems at first glance and Barbie definitely has a lot of teaching moments interspersed throughout its satirical dialogue into utopian perfectionism – enough to make the audiences feel good about sticking to that double feature alongside Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, no matter how back-breaking a 5-hour marathon actually can be.
Mattel President Storms Into the Barbie Sets Over the Script
Creative differences are nothing unheard of in the industry of film and television. For a business that runs on entertainment aided by constantly innovating and evolving subjects, creativity is the one condiment found in abundance around the sets, writers’ rooms, studio lots, and production houses. But the cons to running a business that is founded upon getting an idea off the ground are the millions of bucks that the financiers funnel into a project that can literally make or break a director’s dream. As such, the constant clash over creative differences between the director’s vision and the producer’s requirement has crawled its way into the sets of Barbie as well.
A report by TIME tells of a tale that begins with the Mattel COO and President, Richard Dickson finding something in the script that was pointedly “off-brand” for their IP and he immediately hops on a plane to London to personally tell off Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie about it. However, the director-actor duo, being so in-sync with each other as they were, performed the scripted scene for the COO right then and there. The scene stayed. And Dickson went back to Mattel happy. Their IP, it seemed, was in the right hands after all.
Robbie explained the unusual turn of events saying: “When you look on the page, the nuance isn’t there, the delivery isn’t there.”
Margot Robbie Takes Good Care of Mattel’s IP For Them
If there ever was a fairy godmother watching over Barbie in a fraught time such as this, it has to be the ever-buoyant Margot Robbie. The Australian actress, who approached Mattel in 2018 looking to collaborate with them on the live-action Barbie project, claimed in a cover story with TIME:
“In that very first meeting, we impressed upon [Mattel CEO] Ynon [Kreiz] we are going to honor the legacy of your brand, but if we don’t acknowledge certain things—if we don’t say it, someone else is going to say it. So you might as well be a part of that conversation.”
It seems as if the scripted part which twisted Dickson up into a knot with worry was one of those “certain things” that needed to be said but was considered too delicate for the company to put out there in their grandiose debut foray into Hollywood. Considering how the film is already on the post-production line-up ready for launch, the audiences will see for themselves – and only time will tell.
Barbie arrives at theatres on July 21, 2023.
Source: TIME
