Margot Robbie compared Barbie to Jurassic Park to get it green-lit

We just published a 2,000-word retrospective on Barbie and her long journey to the big screen, but as it turns out, we really should have brought our timeline all the way back to… the dinosaurs. That’s right: she really has been here since the dawn of man!

Just when we thought the scale of this movie couldn’t possibly get any larger, Margot Robbie revealed that life in the Dreamhouse may not have been possible without life first, uh, finding a way in the Jurassic period. Or, at least, without Steven Spielberg making it so iconic.

“I think my pitch in the green-light meeting was the studios have prospered so much when they’re brave enough to pair a big idea with a visionary director,” said Robbie—who also serves as a producer on the film and was attached to the project before Greta Gerwig—in a recent Collider interview.

“I gave a series of examples like, ‘dinosaurs and [Steven] Spielberg,’ that and that, that and that—pretty much naming anything that’s been incredible and made a ton of money for the studios over the years,” she continued. “And I was like, ‘And now you’ve got Barbie and Greta Gerwig.’”

Obviously, Robbie’s peanut-butter-and-jelly pitch struck a chord with studios in the same way as Spielberg’s, who she imagines must have looked pretty “silly” raving about dinosaurs to studio bigwigs before Jurassic Park went on to become “the greatest movie ever.”

Another thing that may have helped turn the tide on the long-languishing project? Big ol’ stacks of cash, obviously. “I think I told them that it’d make a billion dollars, which maybe I was overselling, but we had a movie to make, okay?!” Robbie added. A lack of transparency around data and dollar amounts? Sounds like something the studios love even more than Jurassic Park.