Barbie - A More Successful Movie than You'd Think

Feline Supremacist said:
Barbie sales have been down for the past several years; who knew no one wanted a fat bald Barbie with a prosthetic leg? That's not to say Mattel isn't making money from the Barbie brand but Monster High and LOL dolls have taken a bite from their the market they once dominated, as have American Girl dolls. I think want it back but they have produce dolls girls want and from what they ask me to buy they aren't hairless fatties with peg legs but things like Dreamtopia mermaids and Color Reveal Barbies, you know, dolls that are fun to play with.
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I think it could be much more easily explained by inflation and the rising cost of toys. Back in the day an action figure would cost about $5-6 after taxes and now they're $15-20 depending on how fancy the fucking toy is. Parents have to make do and I'm sure there's plenty of mothers out there that have some left over Barbie's when they were young and passed them on. Same with Transformers and other shit that's been around forever.
 
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BrunoMattei said:
I think it could be much more easily explained by inflation and the rising cost of toys. Back in the day an action figure would cost about $5-6 after taxes and now they're $15-20 depending on how fancy the fucking toy is. Parents have to make do and I'm sure there's plenty of mothers out there that have some left over Barbie's when they were young and passed them on. Same with Transformers and other shit that's been around forever.
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50/50

I don't think kids really play with that many toys anymore due to IPads and Nintendo Switches. From what I have seen kids with, through my camp and library positions, most just have like a plush of Bluey, Sonic or Mario, Pokemon cards, and some Disney toys, like at the time Luca. One 1st grader would bring a bag of animal plushies. Don't remember seeing too many dolls or any action figures.

Most figures at Target seem to be targeting older folks more and more and are just collectibles. Barbie's market is now more than likely comprised of sad Millennial/X collectors explaining all the weird shit. Even looking past Barbie, shelves are full of obscure comic designed DC and Marvel figures that I doubt children give a fuck about along with 80s nostalgia garbage like the new Indiana Jones figures, random Funko Pops, Gremlins, and so much other garbage. Mario and Sonic still seem to sell to children, hence why children actually have merchandise from them.
 
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BrunoMattei said:
I think it could be much more easily explained by inflation and the rising cost of toys. Back in the day an action figure would cost about $5-6 after taxes and now they're $15-20 depending on how fancy the fucking toy is. Parents have to make do and I'm sure there's plenty of mothers out there that have some left over Barbie's when they were young and passed them on. Same with Transformers and other shit that's been around forever.
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Nah, playline Barbies sell for under $25, I've bought them for $7-10; even the Movie Barbie is $25 which is pretty affordable. You're thinking of Barbie Signature, marketed for older adults and aren't for children, which can run into a couple of hundred dollars for particularly coveted editions.

Playline Monster High dolls run slightly cheaper than regular Barbie and LOL dolls are very affordable. American Girl dollars are more expensive but appeal to parents who think toys should be educational. Modern Barbies aren't as sturdy as they used to be so I doubt well played dolls survive childhood in a condition that doesn't scream hand me down either (can confirm).

Barbie isn't as popular as she used to be with girls because Mattel had poor QC, became dated and just weren't what little girls wanted. This is true even of their expensive collector dolls.

I once read a really depressing article a "progressive" woman wrote about how her daughter refused to play with the "full size" Barbie she bought for her, and when asked why she threw her doll in the trash the little girl (around eight years old) said she didn't want a fat Barbie. This upset the mother who berated her and told he she was wrong, blah blah blah, because Mommy was fat (revealing this was extremely offensive to Mom and had little to do with Barbie). I am convinced this girl didn't play with another Barbie again, not because she didn't like them but because she didn't want another lecture from her fat mother. This mom is the kind of person Mattel tries to appeal to, instead of appealing to little girls, and that's why they lose market share to Monster High/LOL/American Girl.
 
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for some reason the talk of higher end nerd Barbies reminds me of the time they had an X Files set of them as Mulder and Scully
I think they did Star Trek TOS uniforms, but not TNG or beyond
 
Feline Supremacist said:
I think using Barbie as a platform for the director's feminist sperging was a bad idea.
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You can say this about every classic property that Hollywood has shat all over in the last few years.

Feline Supremacist said:
Nah, playline Barbies sell for under $25, I've bought them for $7-10; even the Movie Barbie is $25 which is pretty affordable. You're thinking of Barbie Signature, marketed for older adults and aren't for children, which can run into a couple of hundred dollars for particularly coveted editions.

Playline Monster High dolls run slightly cheaper than regular Barbie and LOL dolls are very affordable. American Girl dollars are more expensive but appeal to parents who think toys should be educational. Modern Barbies aren't as sturdy as they used to be so I doubt well played dolls survive childhood in a condition that doesn't scream hand me down either (can confirm).

Barbie isn't as popular as she used to be with girls because Mattel had poor QC, became dated and just weren't what little girls wanted. This is true even of their expensive collector dolls.

I once read a really depressing article a "progressive" woman wrote about how her daughter refused to play with the "full size" Barbie she bought for her, and when asked why she threw her doll in the trash the little girl (around eight years old) said she didn't want a fat Barbie. This upset the mother who berated her and told he she was wrong, blah blah blah, because Mommy was fat (revealing this was extremely offensive to Mom and had little to do with Barbie). I am convinced this girl didn't play with another Barbie again, not because she didn't like them but because she didn't want another lecture from her fat mother. This mom is the kind of person Mattel tries to appeal to, instead of appealing to little girls, and that's why they lose market share to Monster High/LOL/American Girl.
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You should point people to this post any time someone doubts you're a true & honest woman.
 
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Betonhaus said:
I need to watch it before I pass any more judgement then I did. It sounds like it could be interpreted as an analogy for an unchecked feminist dystopia but it may just be bad.
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From everything I've seen, everything involving the feminist angle is about as bad as people are saying it is, but Ken isn't portrayed as evil and that he has a point in trying to be more then just what the matriarchy allows him to be.
 
Random Internet Person said:
Starting to get reviews in.
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More are coming in.
This one actually brings a dilemma I didn't thought of yet, if Barbies are influenced by IRL events (as per the movie), then what happens to all the fucked up ones? Barbies get mutilated all the time (personal experience, can confirm, their eyes looked beautiful in my hands). We can get a Robot Chicken skit tier body horror on imbued on the Barbies, by the logic of the film.
 
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Be aware if Barbie succeeds the way Mattel wants it to, they have plans in motion to make movies on their other properties. Rock Em Sock Em Robots, Hot Wheel, UNO and Bob The Builder films are in the cards.

Some excerpts from an article on the matter:
In 2019, Greta Gerwig became the latest in a line of writers, directors, and producers to make a pilgrimage to a toy workshop in El Segundo, California. Touring the facility, the Mattel Design Center, has become a rite of passage for Hollywood types who are considering transforming one of the company’s products into a movie—a list that now includes such names as J. J. Abrams (Hot Wheels) and Vin Diesel (Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots).
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Kreiz’s thesis that Mattel should become an I.P. factory wasn’t revolutionary. Lego had created a series of hit animated films, and—as Kreiz and other Mattel executives repeatedly noted to me—the company’s main rival, Hasbro, had turned a faded toy-robot line, Transformers, into a multibillion-dollar movie franchise. They made no mention of the catastrophe that followed. In 2008, a year after the release of Michael Bay’s “Transformers,” Hasbro struck a six-year deal with Universal, which secured the film rights to a grab bag of other toys and games, including Monopoly and Candy Land.
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Mattel insists that its films aren’t designed to boost toy sales, but the corporate synergy is undeniable. Major Matt Mason action figures resurfaced at last year’s Comic-Con, and He-Man has returned to toy stores. After Kaluuya’s “Barney” was announced, Mattel—which had inherited the rights to the purple dinosaur in an acquisition but had never produced any related toys—relaunched the brand. At a recent investor presentation, plans were unveiled for a Barney “animated preschool series,” which would be “followed by film, music, apparel, and, of course, a new line of toys.” Kreiz—who is fond of pointing out that “we’re at ‘Fast & Furious 10’ and ‘Hot Wheels 0’ ”—introduced a short, uncomfortable video in which J. J. Abrams struggled to describe the new franchise. “For a long time, we were talking to Mattel about Hot Wheels, and we couldn’t quite find the thing that clicked, that made it worthy of what Hot Wheels—that title—deserved,” he said. “Then we came up with something . . . emotional and grounded and gritty.” (A script has yet to materialize.)
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When I met Marcy Kelly, a cheerful thirty-eight-year-old who has become Mattel’s de-facto screenwriter and punch-up artist, last November, she recalled the moment when Kevin McKeon asked her if she wanted to pitch a script based on the card game: “My reaction was the reaction that everybody has, which is ‘What?’ ” McKeon, she said, sent her a slide deck that “highlighted how cross-cultural the game is, and funny things about how seriously people take it, and little seeds of ideas for things to work into a movie,” including “a meme of Beyoncé holding UNO cards.” The mandate, inexplicably, was for a heist movie.

Kelly got to work. The script she emerged with wasn’t quite what Mattel had had in mind. She’d set “UNO” in Atlanta’s hip-hop scene. “The first draft that I sent in was ‘fuck’-heavy,” she recalled, sheepishly. An executive flagged every instance of the obscenity in the screenplay. “It was something like fifty pages,” she said. “And then the next draft had one. I got my one, well-placed, PG-13 ‘fuck.’ ”
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Kelly stressed that, despite such censorship, Mattel had given her real creative freedom. “They’ve been open to so many kinds of unexpected ideas,” she said. She’d submitted screenplays for four titles, and ran the writers’ room for several others, including one about Bob the Builder. The work had helped her find her footing in the industry; before joining the company, she was best known for her contributions to the mobile game Mean Girls: Senior Year.

If Kelly sometimes struggled to please Mattel, the executives didn’t always seem to know what they wanted, either. Not long after we spoke, her “UNO” script was set aside, and a one-day writers’ room took another run at a concept. A heist, Mattel reasoned, might not be the way forward after all. Some bank vaults can’t be cracked.
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