When a movie makes more than $1.4 billion at the box office and earns eight Academy Award nominations, the studio is going to want to make a sequel. Such was the case with Warner Bros. and “Barbie.”
The blockbuster movie, released in July 2023, catapulted filmmaker Greta Gerwig, producer Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, aka “just Ken,” to new heights and was a huge win for Mattel, which owns the rights to the fashion doll, too — especially as the toy brand aims to stake its claim in Hollywood.
“It’s funny, that knee-jerk reaction in this day and age for everyone to immediately ask about a sequel,” Robbie told Variety for a 2024 cover story, heralding her production company LuckyChap as showpersons of the year. “I don’t think it was like that 20 years ago. This wasn’t designed to be a trilogy.”
That said, all parties were open to the idea of more pink-hued adventures, but nothing could happen unless Gerwig and her writing partner and husband, Noah Baumbach, came back with another great idea.
“Everything went into ‘Barbie’ — and that’s how Greta works,” Robbie said at the time. “She finishes every movie on empty, feeling like she could never make another movie because she put everything she had into that one. So I don’t know what it would take to fill that cup up again for her. Or for us. I think Warners would also agree. I don’t know what more could even look like. We want to make more films that have the effect that ‘Barbie’ has.”
