Mattel recently unveiled its plans for a toy box full of movies based on its intellectual property in the wake of Barbie’s huge success, and people on Twitter have been freaking out. One popular tweet imagined Greta Gerwig as Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer, staring into the middle distance, haunted by the thought of what she had wrought on the film industry. Given the last 15 years of the box office being dominated by superhero movies, I get the impulse to catastrophize at the outset of a trend. But in this case, the worry is unwarranted. There is no way in hell a Mattel Cinematic Universe ever materializes.
I may believe that with all of my being, but Mattel is gung ho about the future of its properties in film. The list of properties being developed includes: Barney, Polly Pocket, Thomas and Friends, American Girl, Hot Wheels, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, Magic 8 Ball, Masters of the Universe, Major Matt Mason, Uno, Wishbone, Matchbox, View Master, and Christmas Balloon. Though Mattel has described this as a Mattel Cinematic Universe, the films aren’t all set to be produced by the same studios. Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots is set up at Universal, long-time home of its star Vin Diesel. Many of the others don’t have a home yet, but Lena Dunham’s Polly Pocket is in the works at MGM, Wishbone is also at Universal, and the J.J. Abrams produced Hot Wheels is at Barbie’s WB.
None of those movies are Barbie, though, and none of them — mark my words — have any chance of getting anywhere near Barbie-sized success. The vast majority of them will not actually get made, regardless of how bullish Mattel execs may be on their prospects.
If you don’t believe me, I would encourage you to look at this tweet. Per its instructions, we witnessed the beginning of a Dark Universe, then that universe promptly imploded. The Tom Cruise Mummy movie was the only one of the planned series that got made, and became one of the only bombs of his career. Universal Monster movies already have a better track record than movies based on toys. But the rest of those movies got canceled, and the next Universal Monster movie, The Invisible Man, was unrelated to the shared universe attempt.
Mattel isn’t doing anything new here. Barbie isn’t the first time that a toy has been adapted into a film, and there’s no reason to think that its massive success is the crest of Hollywood’s next big wave. Some toy adaptations have been successful, like The Lego Movie and most of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies. Some have underperformed, like this year's Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and the G.I. Joe films. And some have outright flopped, like Battleship. In a world where IP movies with huge budgets like Indians Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania are flopping left and right, there’s little reason to think that throwing $100 to $200 million at a Hot Wheels movie is going to be an automatic moneymaker.
Marvel was fundamentally different from its imitators in one simple way — people actually wanted to see its characters together. That’s how comics operate. Spider-Man can just show up in an Iron Man comic, because Marvel owns all the characters. The red tape of licensing prevented those characters from replicating that dynamic in movies, and the MCU promised to fix that. It was exciting to see Spider-Man show up in Captain America: Civil War, but no one is clamoring to see Barbie shake a Magic 8 Ball.
Mattel does have some ideas that sound weird enough that they could work — like Daniel Kaluuya's A24-style Barney movie — but these projects will only succeed if they're executed extremely well. The brand recognition is not going to get people in the door by itself, and, in some cases, may be a liability. No, this is the rare instance where the best case scenario also seems likeliest. Greta Gerwig is an incredibly skilled filmmaker who was in the right place at the right time, got access to the right IP, and made an incredibly successful movie. But it will not usher in a wave of toy adaptations. People care about Barbie. People don’t care about Mattel.