Christie, the SEC, and Amy Schumer: the long road to get Barbie on the big screen

Barbie, as a phenomenon, has always been larger than life. Since she first hit the scene, she transcended classic kids’ toys (and specifically, toys marketed to girls) and became a sensation in her own right. Now she’s about to transcend all over again—evolving from her typically diminutive stature to tower above us all on the big screen. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie premieres on July 21, marking a major milestone in the character’s storied history.

Of course, it all started with an idea back in the 1950s from entrepreneur Ruth Handler “to create a doll that showed girls they had choices” (to hear Mattel tell it). From there, Barbie became an icon and eventually a movie star, though the path to her own theatrical vehicle was not always clear.

March 1959

Per the official Barbie timeline, the brand-new doll debuted at the New York Toy Fair on March 9, 1959. It was an innovation in the American market, wherein the popular toys for girls were baby or toddler dolls. Barbie (full name: Barbara Millicent Roberts) was designed to reflect ’50s fashion and debuted in a glamorous black-and-white bathing suit with a curly ponytail. The look and Barbie’s inception are dramatized in a 2001: A Space Odyssey parody scene in Gerwig’s film. (Barbara Handler, daughter of Ruth and inspiration for the Barbie character, also has a cameo in the movie.)

March 1961

As Barbie soared in popularity, Mattel was apparently “inundated” with requests to give the doll a boyfriend, per Forbes. In response, the company created Ken, a male doll that was named after Handler’s son Kenneth. Like Barbie, he debuted in his bathing suit, a pair of red swim trunks. This set the blueprint for Ken-ergy, as Barbie’s Ryan Gosling has explained the character’s job is “just beach.” Barbie’s Dreamhouse, another signature piece of Barbie lore, was rolled out just a year later in 1962.

1968

Amid the Civil Rights movement, Mattel released its first Black doll, a friend of Barbie’s called Christie, who joined the growing Barbie universe (which included Barbie’s bestie Midge, played in the film by Emerald Fennell, and a younger sister named Skipper). While Barbie would eventually end up with a cast of supporting characters (and a range of special celeb dolls, the first of which was Twiggy in 1967), a diverse set of dolls actually named “Barbie” wouldn’t come around until 1980.

1985 – 1995

Valid criticisms of capitalism and glorifying a specific type of blonde, white womanhood aside, one of the core tenets of the Barbie line was that girls can do anything, as demonstrated by the We Girls Can Do Anything campaign in 1985. After all, Barbie became an astronaut way back in ’65, before man had ever set foot on the moon. As the wide-ranging cast of Barbie shows, Barbie has had a number of jobs. In 1985, she became a CEO; in 1992, she launched her first campaign for president. According to Mattel, she’s had “over 250 inspirational careers,” including pilot, firefighter, journalist, entrepreneur, surgeon, and many more.

(As an aside, by this point Handler had resigned from Mattel and was indicted for making false financial statements, alongside some other Mattel execs, by the SEC. She pleaded no contest, per Forbes. Girls can do anything!)

1999

Barbie made her big screen debut in Pixar’s Toy Story franchise. A script for the first film included Barbie saving Woody and Buzz from Sid’s house, but Mattel apparently refused to license the rights. When Toy Story became a massive success, Mattel changed its tune; “Tour Guide Barbie” was featured in 1999’s Toy Story 2, her theatrical debut. She would go on to have an even bigger role in 2010’s Toy Story 3.

October 2001

In the early 2000s, Mattel took Barbie’s film career in its own hands with the formation of Barbie Entertainment. Under this new media wing, the company released a series of animated movies that aired on Nickelodeon and were also available on DVD. The first, Barbie In The Nutcracker, was released in October 2001, the first in a series of classic and fairy tale adaptations. There were also a handful of original plots, like the Barbie: Fairytopia sub-series. These TV movies aren’t exactly up to Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach Barbie standards (or even, necessarily, Noah Baumbach Madagascar standards), but they are much beloved by a certain generation of Barbie enthusiasts, if the Barbie As Princess And The Pauper song meme is anything to go by. Mattel has continued to release animated features, under various banners, through 2023.

September 2009

Mattel officially dipped its toe in the water at putting Barbie on the big screen by partnering with Universal Pictures in 2009. At the time, Laurence Mark was set to produce, per Variety. According to Mattel’s Richard Dickson at the time, Barbie hadn’t gotten her own starring vehicle yet because “The brand wasn’t ready for a movie” up to that point, but Barbie had “evolved from a toy into an intellectual property” over the previous 10 years, so now, ostensibly, she was ready. That proved incorrect, of course, as several studios and production teams would take a crack at Barbie over the next 14 years to no avail.

March 2015

By 2014, Mattel had jumped ship from Universal and set up shop with Sony. Jenny Bicks was originally set to pen the script for the live-action comedy, produced by Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald (via Deadline). By March 2015, Diablo Cody had been brought in to rewrite the script, and Amy Pascal had joined the production team.

In later years, Cody was frank that she was “literally incapable of turning in a Barbie draft.” Reflecting in 2023, she said, “When I was first hired for this, I don’t think the culture had not embraced the femme or the bimbo as valid feminist archetypes yet.” Cody added that “they wanted a girl-boss feminist twist on Barbie, and I couldn’t figure it out because that’s not what Barbie is.”

In the meantime, Barbie entered the influencer age and became a vlogger. Her YouTube channel hosts content that ranges from Barbie explaining her day-to-day life to thoughtful conversations about mental health. Plenty to tide her adoring public over during the crawl to the big screen.

December 2016

Sony had commissioned three additional Barbie drafts (from Lindsey Beer, Bert Royal, and Hilary Winston, per Deadline) before Amy Schumer came on board in December 2016. She signed up to star in the movie, and took a pass at the script with her sister Kim Caramele. This version was supposed to be about a “perfect land of Barbies” where one woman realizes she doesn’t belong. She would then be “expelled from the idealistic land and journeys to the real world, where she discovers that being unique is an asset.” Schumer eventually left the project due to what she called “creative differences.”

The studio “definitely didn’t want to do it the way I wanted to do it, the only way I was interested in doing it,” Schumer later said, adding that she was rubbed the wrong way when she was gifted a pair of Manolo Blahnik heels when she was cast: “The idea that that’s just what every woman must want, right there, I should have gone, ‘You’ve got the wrong gal.’”

July 2017

After Schumer departed, Sony took one last stab at Barbie by bringing Anne Hathaway on board. Hathaway reportedly handpicked up-and-coming director Alethea Jones to helm this new (ultimately unrealized) version of the movie. Oceans Eight scribe Olivia Milch was also reportedly brought on to do yet another rewrite, per Deadline. By early 2018, this version was already dead in the water, and the whole operation was put on hold until at least May 2020 (which turned out to be optimistic).

July 2019

Things took a turn for the better for Ms. Barbie when Sony’s film rights lapsed and Warner Bros. Pictures took the wheel. Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment has a first-look deal with the studio, which paved the way for her to both produce and star in the film. From there, she invited Greta Gerwig on board, who invited her partner Noah Baumbach on board. LuckyChap managed to protect Gerwig and Baumbach’s creative process from the powers that be at WB and Mattel; prior to completion of the script, the filmmaker shared only one abstract poem (which “shares some similarities with the Apostles’ Creed”) with the higher-ups to demonstrate her vision for the film, according to a 2023 Vogue profile.

October 2021

Ryan Gosling made history when cast as the first live-action Ken, a groundbreaking moment that would alter his Ken-ergy forevermore.

Gosling later said that after Gerwig offered him the role, he told her he needed time to think about it. After hanging up on the director, he walked into his backyard to find a Ken doll “face-down in the mud next to a squished lemon.” He took a photo, sent it to Gerwig, and said “I shall be your Ken. For his story must be told.”

February – April 2022

We knew very little about Barbie in 2022, but we did know one thing: the cast was chock-full of famous people. America Ferrera joined in February; Marvel’s Simu Liu was announced in March. Kate McKinnon, Ariana Greenblatt, and Alexandra Shipp were also announced as part of the cast that month, and then a whole bunch more (Emma Mackey, Issa Rae, Michael Cera, Hari Nef, and Will Ferrell, to name just a few) in April. That month, we also got our first look at Robbie as Barbie, and it was very pink.

July 2022

By July, we’d had our first look at Gosling’s Ken, and it also became clear that most of the people who were cast were all playing the same characters: Barbies and Kens. The Barbies were all having sleepovers after filming, and the Kens were praising Gerwig and Baumbach’s script as the best thing they’d ever read. This is pretty typical of the Barbie/Ken dynamic, as we now know.

December 2022

The first teaser trailer for Barbie arrived in December 2022, and the picture of one of the summer’s most hotly anticipated films was becoming more clear. We’d seen Barbie and Ken rollerskating and gotten wind of Will Ferrell’s villainous Mattel exec. Now, there was a Helen Mirren-narrated 2001 pastiche explaining the origins of Barbie.

April 2023

April was a big month in Barbie world. We got a new teaser trailer and an array of gorgeous character posters, which introduced the world to a crucial new meme format: “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.” Footage also premiered at CinemaCon, in which it became clear that this Barbie is suffering from an existential crisis.

June 2023

A full-length trailer for Barbie, first seen at CinemaCon, finally hit the Internet in May. After that, the Barbie press tour—which already seemed to have been going on forever—kicked off in earnest. Barbie gave a tour of the Dreamhouse. Airbnb offered a Dreamhouse. Robbie rocked a bunch of Barbie looks and Gosling kept going on about Ken-ergy. The soundtrack made a huge splash, particularly the Nicki Minaj/Ice Spice collab that provided a fresh take on Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.” The movie launched over 100 brand partnerships, and we found out the movie used up the world’s entire supply of pink paint. The Internet, in general, had a ball.

July 2023

Unfortunately, the fun had to come to an end. On the heels of the film causing an international incident (involving the controversial “nine-dash line” map), SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA on strike, essentially cutting all promotion of Hollywood short. A brief extension of the contract allowed Barbie to get a couple of red-carpet premieres in, but unfortunately, Ryan Gosling is no longer allowed to talk about Ken-ergy. They’d done their jobs, though: Barbie is projected to make around $100 million in its first weekend, per Variety. (Bonus: according to AMC, 20,000 moviegoers are doing the “Barbenheimer” double feature.)

After a long and winding road, Barbie premieres July 21.