A pink storm has hit the world of cinema. Greta Gerwig's Barbie has become a historic marketing coup, the product of the alliance between Warner Bros. studio and American toy manufacturer Mattel. With worldwide earnings of $1.2 billion (€1.1 billion) as of Thursday, August 17, the feature film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken has the box office under its spell.
Released on July 21, Barbie is already hot on the heels of the year's biggest success, Super Mario Bros, an animated film by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic that has been in theaters since April and earned $1.35 billion according to Box Office Mojo. Barbie is already the second-biggest box office earner in Warner Bros. history after The Snow Queen 2 ($1.45 billion). The adventures of a triumphant Barbie in a matriarchal bubble, and the frustrations of Ken – reduced to the status of an accessory like a handbag, before attempting a "testosterone" rebellion – are also giving a strong boost to cinema worldwide.
According to Gower Street's latest study, the sector can expect to return to pre-Covid-19 levels of activity thanks to the Barbie tsunami and the success of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. The biopic about the director of the Manhattan Project − the other summer blockbuster − has achieved $653 million in box office earnings worldwide. But the study warns that the ongoing Hollywood actors' strike may darken prospects for the end of 2023.
An icon of US auteur cinema, Greta Gerwig has become the first woman with a solo film to top the billion-dollar mark in box office earnings. The exceptional performance of the director behind Lady Bird and Little Women, who co-wrote the screenplay for Barbie with her partner in crime, the director Noah Baumbach, confirms Mattel's new strategy in cinema.
The CEO of Mattel since 2018, Ynon Kreiz, told The New Yorker on July 2 that "my thesis was that we needed to transition from being a toy-manufacturing company, making items, to an IP company, managing franchises." With franchising being a fundamental part of Hollywood for decades, Kreiz relaunched the group's film division, Mattel Films, created in 2013, and entrusted it to Robbie Brenner, a recognized producer of American independent cinema who presided over the destinies of the Oscar-winning Dallas Buyers Club by Jean-Marc Vallée and Burden by Andrew Heckler.
Kreiz did not hesitate to indulge in a jubilant sequence of self-mockery by being caricatured in Barbie as a loathsome character embodying all that is chilling about capitalism. In a February 2022 interview with Time Magazine, well before the film's release, the CEO expressed his openness to the idea of producing "more Barbie movies." His big move into the seventh art should convince him to turn his iconic doll into a franchise, like the Marvel heroes owned by the Disney group. The Mattel catalog "is second only to Disney," Kreiz told The New Yorker. Marvel's comic book characters managed to become Hollywood stars and Mattel toys are poised to follow the same path.
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