Billion Dollar Doll
This weekend Barbie did the impossible and crossed the $1 billion mark.
The question all of Hollywood is asking now is; HOW?
Barbie is the kind of movie that film executives adore, the kind with a restrained budget that results in unrestrained profit. Barbie isn’t the kind of Disney budget monster where raking in a billion bucks is barely making up for the outlay. The very highest estimate I’ve seen for Barbie’s budget is $150 million. Okay, since the theaters get a 50% cut, Barbie had to make $300 million to make up production budget with another $100 – $150 million on top of that for the marketing. Meaning Barbie has been in the black for a while now, and Zaslav doing his victory dance in Bob Iger’s face.
This is an undeniable success. How do we duplicate this is the question that Tinsel Town is frantically trying to figure out.
This was the movie that finally got the audience they’ve been absolutely panting after since 2016, the one with the mostly women audience. Better still so far as they are concerned, there was solid feminist messaging in Barbie.
It turns out that women didn’t want Rey, Carol Danvers’ Captain Marvel, or Mikey Spock. They didn’t want a gender swapped male hero who was putting men in their place and making them stay in their lane. Women just wanted Barbie.
The men who got dragged in found something they liked in Ken. He had problems they identified with, they understood his struggle. Hollywood absolutely will not. They might be willing to make movies like Top Gun: Maverick but they won’t enjoy it and it will show.
The American movie industry is going to be decades recovering from the self-imposed and nearly fatal disaster of Chasing the Twenty Billion Dollar Dragon. Every studio switching to streaming resulted in universal business failure where all secondary and tertiary budget streams were sacrificed to roll everything into each company’s own streaming service. This was combined with a ludicrous fashion of turning male-centric IPs into female-centric ones.
I predict with perfect confidence that Hollywood will ignore Ken completely, read only the lessons that will confirm their bigotries and go back to making movies like Ghostbusters 2016 but this time with attractive women dressed in pink.
There is no such thing as too big to fail but there is absolutely such a thing as too big to succeed.
