After Tom Cruise puts butts back in movie seats (he’s talented at this) with Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, it’s time for a double feature. That would be Barbie and Oppenheimer, and surprisingly enough, the former movie is proving to be much more controversial than the latter. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling will likely, however, take the global box office by storm beginning on July 21.
This won’t be the first attempt to bring Barbie to multiplexes in live-action mode. There was, at one point, going to be a version starring Amy Schumer and penned by Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody. In a new interview with GQ, Cody explained why her take on the project fell apart. “That idea of an anti-Barbie made a lot of sense given the feminist rhetoric of ten years ago,” Cody explained. “I didn’t really have the freedom then to write something that was faithful to the iconography; they wanted a girl-boss feminist twist on Barbie, and I couldn’t figure it out because that’s not what Barbie is.”
Barbie director and co-writer Greta Gerwig also found some difficulty in appeasing Mattel’s wants for the movie, and the company’s president even confronted her about an “off-brand” part of the film. This was always going to be a tough project to adapt both faithfully and in a worthwhile way, but Cody seems to take much of the blame for her script’s failure to launch:
Five years later, Cody has some ideas about what went wrong. “I think I know why I sh*t the bed,” she tells GQ over the phone from Los Angeles. “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. If you look up ‘Barbie’ on TikTok you’ll find this wonderful subculture that celebrates the feminine, but in 2014, taking this skinny blonde white doll and making her into a heroine was a tall order.”
We will soon find out how well 2023’s Barbie picks up the project. Hopefully, it’ll be a pink-painted slam dunk and keep the Tom Cruise-led fires burning.
(Via GQ)
