Hi Barbie, Hi Ken.
His Barbie, Hi Barbie, Hi Barbie, Hi Barbie, Hi Barbie with the radio.
Hey, did you hear there's a Barbie movie coming out this summer? Did you bring your roll the Blates?
I literally go nowhere without them.
Yeah, that would explain the hot pink invasion of the Internet for weeks now. And Barbie's got all the makings of a summer blockbuster, big name stars. Margot Robbie plays Barbie, Ryan Gosling is Ken, and a viral marketing campaign that has everyone talking. It's also got something else going for it, a potentially massive, multi generational audience of people who have many memories and strong feelings about this sixty four year old dull, including the producers on the Big Take podcast team.
I do remember one year for my birthday, someone gave me this Barbie that had hair that changed when I got wet, so you could dip her hair into the sink and it would turn blue and pink, and I thought that.
Was really cool.
I am extremely excited for the movie.
I had the best of both worlds with Mattel Toys. My parents bought me both hot wheels with the orange racetrack and a boatload of barbiees. Sometimes I played with them together, other times, depending on how I was feeling, you know, I would just play with one or the other. Most times, though, my heart's desire drove me to those orange race tracks.
I loved Barbie as a kid. I particularly loved dressing her up. My friend had the Barbie dream House, and I loved to fill up the pool when I was at my friend's house and we'd have them go swimming. I did have fun as I got older cutting her hair, and then I realiz it didn't grow back.
I never really liked Barbie's when I was a kid.
One birthday someone gave me a Barbie Weed roller.
Place and I was like, eh, okay, but it seemed expensive, so I was like.
Okay, nice.
I think after a rough couple of years, you know, with the pandemic and everything, it's really nice to just have a movie where you can go in and think about nothing. It's fun, it's flirty, it's colorful, and overall it's Barbie Like. That's the best kind of summer movie that you could ask for.
But Barbie's maker, Mattel, isn't just hoping for a hit in theaters. Barbie sales have fluctuated over the years, the companies struggled to make this all important but aging product line relevant today, and for a lot of parents, that original Barbie esthetic, the permanent high heels, the pink convertible, the dream house is the opposite of what they want
their kids to emulate and aspire to be. Bloomberg's Kelly Gilblum writes in BusinessWeek that one aim of the movie is to get those skeptics to see matel reimagine Barbie in a new light, and hopefully turn them into customers, all while not doing anything to disappoint Barbie's intensely loyal fans.
It was always pretty risky to try to put a movie out about the doll, because it's so personal and the emotions are so heightened around her that it was got to backfire.
I'm Wescasova today on the big take Barbie's high Stake debut on the Pink Carpet. Kelly, I think if you have an Internet connection, it's been pretty impossible to avoid Barbie movie hype. And I think a lot of people and I'm one of them, thought, oh, this will be a fun summer movie. But you and our colleague Thomas Buckley Wright in this story that this movie is really important and there's a lot at stake. Why is this such a big important moment for Mattel.
When you think about how the company is structured, Their biggest brand and their biggest source of revenue is Barbie. This is a brand they invented in the nineteen fifties, has been the best selling doll of all time. It's completely iconic, and it's kind of the way Barbie goes the way Mattel goes in terms of how the company fares.
But Barbie's sort of interesting in that the way she was invented was to have an incredibly personal connection to the little girls that play with her, and that they're supposed to envision themselves as adults in playing with Barbie's. With this reputation of the doll at stake, they really have to get it right. They really have to show that they can connect with that customer again, that they can be something like a role model.
Kelly, you said that Mattel's biggest is the Barbie doll and has been for a really long time. How much money is Barbie worth to Mattel?
Barbie is worth about a third of its overall revenue. At its peak, it was close to two billion a year. It's gone all the way down to nine hundred million in recent years, but it is the biggest sales driver of the company and probably the most profitable item that they sell.
And as you say, it's kind of come down, and some of that has to do, I guess with the pandemic when toy sales were just gangbusters for everything over the.
Past few years, Barbie's head ups and downs. They did a big makeover the doll in twenty sixteen. Sales went up, So when the pandemic happened and there was an overall boom in toy sales, they were well positioned for that and sales skyrocketed. But then in recent years there's been inflation, there's been economic malaise, and things have kind of fallen back down and normalized again.
Kelly, you mentioned that the company had reimagined Barbie. Why did they feel like they needed to reinvent her or change the way she was?
So the way Barbie has traditionally been, you know, has been very close to the roots of her invention in the nineteen fifties, and it was based on a gold digging comic strip character, and she was kind of like this archetype of a bombshell blonde, Marilyn Monroe type of figure, and they pretty much stayed close to that for most
of her history. You know, there were some studies that said, like, you know, if you put Barbie into a real life human forms, you wouldn't have enough space in her midsection to fit her intestines. She wouldn't be able to lift her head up. It was just very preposterous the kind of anatomy that she had, and so the reimagining of it was to make it more realistic and also appealing
to a broader group of young girls. If the doll is meant to be a projection of their future selves, you just cannot imagine playing adult with a doll that just will never be you.
And Kelly, one of the things in the story that you write about is that as Barbie seemed no longer kind of relevant and girls no longer saw themselves in Barbie, other doll makers moved in to clean that cultural relevance.
Yeah, they really kind of lost their way, the Mattel executives did, I would say starting in the early two thousands. That's when the real crisis for Barbie began. It started because they had a disastrous acquisition that costs a lot of money, and a CEO is a great steward of Barbie left the company as a result of that acquisition going sour, and so they had the people come in
and they just weren't as good at connecting. They've done well under male leadership before, but it was hard, I guess, for those particular men that were CEOs at the time to connect with that young girl mindset. For some reason, as these years were going on, they had competitors come in, which wasn't like the first time that had ever happened, but they weren't able to respond to it in a
good way. The first was an actual MATEL designer who worked on Barbie created a new design for some dolls called Brats.
Passions.
They were more diverse, they were cool.
I remember those dolls when my daughters were young. They were just everywhere. Brats were the doll.
Oh yeah, they were huge. They got to a billion dollars in sales pretty quickly, which took Barbie forty years. Mattel just got involved in lawsuits and that I got totally mired and arguing over that rather than trying to address their own product and putting their attention there. And at the same time, you know, they also had this license. They've had a long term partnership with Disney to create toys based on their intellectual property Disney you know, franchises,
and one of them was Disney Princesses. So they were making these Disney Princesses dolls also making Barbies, and they were kind of competing against each other within the company even and the Disney Princess dolls were doing extremely well, the Princess movies were doing extremely well, and I think
it just caused further atrophying of their focus on Barbie. Eventually, what happened was Disney wasn't super happy Hasbro, their you know, a long time rival for many many decades, was doing also well by making really big movies based on their toys, mostly Transformers was the first one, and so they argued to Disney they should get the Disney Princess license taken away, and that just showed how badly Barbie was performing. Once they didn't have those doll sales figures to compensate for
the Barbie losses anymore. So it was just a lot of things that were going on at the same time, and they were really they really lost the way because they were trying to follow their competitors, and then under this era, they were just trying to copy Disney princesses. They were trying to copy brats instead of trying to do their own thing and stay in tune with what
girls actually cared and talked about. What partly spurred on the body makeover of Barbie in twenty sixteen was market research that Mattel did, internal research that showed moms hated Barbie's. They would not buy them for their daughters. They just wouldn't do it. That partly has eased as they have done a lot to improve their image. I wouldn't say
they have one hundred percent fixed this issue. So there's still some research out there that's showing people are still associating it the old way, no matter how you know much they've done with the actual new toys.
How does the Barbie of today look different from that original Barbie?
So the Barbie of today comes in many different body types, many different skin tones, many different hair color, hair type, eye color, as possible you can be with the limits of manufacturing. They're broadening it out to include various types of physical abilities that people have. They have Barbies in a wheelchair, they have Barbies with hearing aids, they have Barbies who have limb differences. They have all sorts of different types of Barbies, and they will probably continue to widen that.
And has that sparked a Barbie revival in sales that all kinds of different girls can see themselves, see their future selves in Barbie in a way that they couldn't before.
Yes, it's definitely sparked reverval and sales. I wouldn't say they're at their past glory again. The peak sales was in nineteen ninety seven when they had the perfect eighties working girls or nineties you know, big hair Barbie that was really appealing to little girls. So they've not quite got to that level again, but it definitely has improved things. And also with the different body types of Barbie's, you have to keep in mind that a big portion of
sales of Barbie is the accessories. So the clothes, the house, the car, those were all designed for the old Barbie body type. So the new Barbie you kind of have to get new stuff to go along with that. So it's kind of had an additional boost of their ability to sell a new car that the Kirby Barbie can fit into and the new clothes that she can wear.
Since Barbie sales haven't rebounded enough, they're hoping that this movie is going to re kindle America's love of Barbie and start selling lots more of them.
Yeah, exactly. If you look at the history of Barbie, the times when the sales have been really good and everything's been going really well for the company at large is when they've created something that they kind of call a cultural moment. When the Space Race was on, they made Barbie like an astronaut and she was one of the first women, you know, to go to space.
And body, I think that.
Body and just kind of keeping up with like these things that create a huge conversation and everybody's talking about the doll. That buzz is usually enough to keep people interested, even if it's sometimes criticism or negativity, And that's exactly what they're trying to do with this movie and why
you see the marketing of it is insane. They are trying to make this doll just a subject of conversation again and create this kind of cultural moment that make girls feel like this is it, this is now, this is the cool thing.
After the break. How the Barbie movie came together.
I remember I had about three huge boxes for Barbies that were gifted to me, and I was not particularly interested in them. I remember the funniest part was each Barbie will be used about once to have their hair chopped off and then forgotten for the rest of time.
My first memory of a Barbie is Bacomi, Columbia, when I used to steal my cousins Barbies so I can use Barbie as a get away driver and use her car for my Batman figurines.
So I never played with Barbie's at all. I was more interested in Star Wars, action figures and Transformers.
But this didn't.
Stop my mother, who so desperately wanted to have a girly daughter, from purchasing the special holiday edition Barbie every single year.
I never really played with Barbie as a kid. I mostly remember, just like the intense amount of parity that existed in like media, she was more often like as a brand, a butt of jokes than actually like the main character Kelly.
So now Mattau has decided to make this movie, which they think is going to revive Barbie, and they know that they've got to get it right. And you tell in this story how they went about creating this kind of make or break movie.
Yeah, it was a fascinating process because you know, I don't even know how many Barbie scripts have been written over the years, but this was an idea that was long running around Hollywood, running around the company. When it really got off the ground was in twenty eighteen Inonchrist who is from the entertainment world, has never worked in toys. Came from a place called Maker Studios, and he also worked at Fox Kids Europe, and so he knows a
lot about actually creating television content. That's his focus. And he said, we need to be an intellectual property company. We need to be in the business of managing franchises.
And the opportunity was to continue to succeed in the toy business, fix that area. That that is our foundation. This is what we build, an emotional relationship with our fans. And from there, once you have that in a good place, you can extend the business and grow into other verticals.
That's Mittel CEO and non Cries and a little plug for the home team here. It's from an interview on an upcoming episode of the Bloomberg original series called The Circuit with Emily Chang.
So enon Christ He took the lay of the land and he saw, you know, there's this script going around for Barbie. They had all sorts of different ideas for it. One had Amy Schumer attached, and she was gonna be you know, it's kind of like this parody and she was kicked out of a perfect Barbie world and she goes on these zany adventures. Nobody really liked it. He didn't like it. It was making fun of the doll. It kind of made the doll the butt of the joke.
He kind of replicated the whole criticism of Barbie, which is that she was always kind of not really competent and depended on men.
Yeah.
I also think the company didn't exactly know how to do this. They never had a blockbuster. They've had one like feature film now totally bombed and it horribly called Max Deal. Then sowing On said, look, I'm going to take charge of this. I'm gonna start my own movie division. I'm gonna have my own person run it, who's like a very serious Hollywood player, and we're going to do it differently in the sense that we're not even going to bother these filmmakers. We're going to just let them
do what they do. Even if we don't like every single thing that they say, and maybe they make us look a little goofy, it's worth it to make great content because that has to be the goal.
I guess one of the reasons that they had the confidence to do that, to go let them do their thing, is they attracted some top Hollywood talent to work on this movie.
Yeah, getting the right person to run the movie division that was a big key to getting the right talent. Yon speaks frequently with Richard love It. He's a co chairman at Creative Artists Agencies, very powerful Hollywood agency, and he helped get all these people in line for Mattel.
One of his first orders of businesses he wanted to meet Margo when he became the CEO, and within six weeks of getting to that position, he was at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Margot Robbie because he saw her as a barbie.
Why why did he see her as a barbie? Other than the obvious which is she looks like a Barbie.
She's very consistently successful. She's a successful producer. She's got her own company, Lucky Chap Entertainment, Oscar nominated, done a wide variety of film and also a lot of women focus filmmaking. She's just very wide appeal to the sort of people that they want to speak to.
So Mattel landed this superstar to play Barbie really important. But then there were also the other people working on the film to actually write it and make it.
That's right along the way. He also got Robbie Brenner to run the whole Mattel Film division, and she's a very powerful Hollywood producer, probably best known for now Spyers Club.
We wanted to make sure that we were telling a story that felt very universal and very global, and it wasn't just for girls or women, but it also appealed to men as well, and we just wanted to do something that sort of could embrace everybody.
And then as Robbie Brenner and Margot Robbie were in conversations and working on the movie together, it was Margot Robbie that actually suggested you should get Greta Gerwig to do the screenplay, and she's really dominant in a ton of this female coming of age genre, probably best known for Ladybird, which is somewhat autobiographical movie of her growing up in Sacramento, and then Little Women, which is the classic retelling the novel of you know, women trying to
make it in this man's world. Greta by her was said yes pretty much right away and got her partner, Noah Bambach to sign on too, and they wrote the screw. They did it pretty much without interference, and then they got very attached to the script and Greta ended up becoming the director as well.
And you write that the script they came up with was unlike anything they probably would have imagined that they would have come up with for a Barbie movie.
Yeah, the script was interesting, you know in Nana said he didn't want something conventional, and she certainly didn't deliver something conventional. She decided, instead of making Barbie the butt of the joke, make the Mattel executives the butt of the joke and makes fun of the way they kind of managed this brand and all the circumstances that Barbie and female and Little Girls all the face in real life.
So since this movie is in one way supposed to operate as an ad for Barbie, how did Mattel executives react when they saw this script that was kind of poking fun at them.
They say, they laughed really hard, and they thought it was hilarious, and they, you know, we're totally in on the joke. I imagine there was a little bit of humility that they had to accept with this, but they did.
When we come back Mattel Goo's full tilt with Barbie merchandise.
When I was a kid, it was kind of a house divided. My sister loved the Barbies and I loved the hot Wheels, so there was conflict for a while until eventually we just decided that the hot wheels and Barbiees were friends, and the hot wheels were sentient and they could all talk to each other, and then that was just like a weird car Barbie commune. I remember playing with Barbie's growing up, especially with my older sisters and now my nieces play with those Barbies.
Barbie means so much to me because it was one of the first toys that I ever felt represented in. You always think of Barbie as this really tall woman with blonde hair and high heat and blue eyes. But actually, when I went to India for the first time as a kid, I remember picking out two Barbies that looked just like me. You know, they had hair down to their hips and they were wearing traditional Indian langas.
So Kelly, they delivered this script and now they've made the movie, and it's really interesting because the movie itself operates on a lot of levels in a way that maybe you wouldn't think a silly summer movie would like. Barbie herself is kind of a complicated character.
Yeah, she really is, and you know, this movie kind of portrays her as living in this perfect Barbie world and there's snow insecurities for women.
It is the best day I've ever So was yesterday, and so is tomorrow and every day from there forever.
And you know, it's not just Margot Robbie that plays Barbie. The whole world is full of Barbie's there, and they're all different races and types of people doing different types of jobs. Issa Ray is a president Barbie. Douah lipas a mermaid Barbie. They have all these different types of people. But then she has this existential crisis. We don't really know what causes it. But her feet get flat, you know, unlike Barbie's classic perfectly arched feet, which are permanently in
that position. And she thinks about Dan, you think about ninety. So she kind of goes into this journey into the real world.
And Margot Robbie as Barbie also has to contend with a Kendall who is really still frozen in the past version of Ken.
Oh yeah, so Ken, who's played by Ryan Gosling, has an interesting journey because in the classic real experience of Ken, he was just meant to be an accessory to Barbie. He doesn't have a story. There's a joke in the movie, the CEO of Mattel, who's played by Will ferrells as we never think about Ken. Ever, he kind of tags along with her, and I think his story is a bit of a mystery. But he body some of these
old cultural hang ups that have plagued Barbie. They're going into a hospital and he asked to perform an app in deck to me, just one because he's a man. I won't let you do just one app and deck to me. But I'm a man, but not a doctor.
Can I talk to a doctor?
You are talking to a doctor there he is doctor.
How many good security so Kelly. Obviously a lot of attention to the movie, a lot of hype around the trailer, anticipation of the movie coming, but also the merchandise is just everywhere.
Yes, the marketing of the Barbie movie is on another level. It's unbelievable. I don't even know how much would have been spent on the overall marketing, probably as much as one hundred million dollar budget of the actual movie. Not all of that by Mattel, a lot of that by Warner Brothers. I mean, Mattel has over one hundred merchandise partners that are just doing Barbie branded things like Barbie sweatshirts,
Barbie dog hats, Barbie cocktail glasses, Barbie Ruggs. But also just so much stunt marketing that's been a part of this. I mean they have this Airbnb Barbie Dreamhouse, so many Barbie events, and they've got a real World of Barbie exhibit in LA and you can go take your picture in a plastic Barbie case. So when we're talking about Mattel needs to create cultural moments, I would say the marketing of it is almost as important as the movie itself.
And what's really interesting, as you described this, is that it's trying to bring in adults into this world because a lot of that stuff is not for kids.
Yeah, most of the things that I've seen in terms of the marketing aren't for kids. Very few things are for kids. There are actual dolls that are based on the Barbie characters, like there's a Margo Robbie Barbie doll, so that would be for their traditional three to eight demo, But so much of this is for adults, appealing to that older group that is still associating Barbie with the old image. So this movie is a big opportunity to correct those perceptions, you know, from Mettel's point of view.
And I guess rehabilitate these adults view of Barbie to kind of make Barbie safe for their own kids.
Yes. I mean, if you're a mother and you thought about how bad Barbie made you feel, I'm not going to make my daughter feel bad by giving her some perfect body that she will never attain and just making her look at it. So that's what they're trying to do is to show no, no, that's not what Barbie is anymore. Barbie's going to make your daughter feel good, and so they're trying to convince the mothers. So that's
who they have to rehabilitate the image for. But also this is about creating new revenue streams for the company.
And that's a really important point because it's not just this movie that Mattel is hoping we'll turn its around. It's the beginning of a huge chain of other movies that they hope can build on its success.
Yeah, they're hoping that this movie serves as the blueprint for a bigger business model shift at the company. So they feel like they're already very successful at just making marketing toys. And if you think about what success for one single Barbie movie could be, it would be to turn it into a franchise. So then you get the Ken spinoff movie, you get the Skipper TV show, you
get the Barbie theme park. They already have fourteen other films on different Mettel brands that they have in the works, and so they want to keep replicating.
Fourteen other movies just announced.
Yeah, but I mean dozens more that they're developing or working to get announced.
That aren't about Barbie but are based on other Metel toys.
Yes, Bine large based on other Mettel toys. For the most part, it's hot Wheels, it's Matchbox cars, it's Barney the Dinosaur, Polly Pocket, American Girl Dolls. They're going into the toy chest to try to create new franchises.
How much money does Mattel hope to make off of this Barbie Juggernaut.
Mattel didn't put any money into the production or only maybe a phenomenal amount into the production of the film, so they don't get box office returns, they don't get ticket sales. All of their money that they make is going to be in increasing the value of the company, increasing sales overall. It's hard to put a number on that because I think they would probably see it as limitless.
The very highest early estimate I've seen for the domestic opening weekend, the three day opening weekend in the US and Canada is eighty million dollars. That would make it one of the biggest movies of the year, better than The Flash, better than Indiana Jones. It would be huge. It's supposed to beat Oppenheimer, which is a movie that comes up the exact same day, and I would say overall it'll be in the hundreds of millions worldwide.
So at the beginning of our conversation, we're talking about how this is really big bet. Do you think that it pays off for Mattel?
I think based on what I've seen, yes, it probably will pay off. They do seem to have hit the right notes with everything going viral and there being this big Barbie craze. That is what they wanted. You know, Even if toy sales stay flat this year, I'd say in the coming years they could go up just based on building off the momentum of this. And even if nobody sees the movie, they've already gotten all that attention.
Kelly, Are you going to see the movie?
Of course, I'm going to see the movie. I can't wait.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thank you for having me, Thanks.
For listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Virgolina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Our producers are Moe Barrow and Michael Falero. Raphael i'm celia is our engineer.
Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin and special thanks to our colleagues at the Bloomberg Original series The Circuit with Emily Chang and by the way, definitely check out the show. Emily gets behind the scenes with founders, influencers and innovators. I'm west Kesova. We'll be back on Monday with another big take. Have a great weekend.