When “Barbie” was released in 2023, it quickly became a phenomenon. It was the top box office film of the year, earning $1.4 billion worldwide, and it became Warner Bros.’s highest-grossing film ever, outpacing both “Dark Knight” movies, “Wonder Woman” and every chapter in the “Harry Potter” franchise.
It was a DayGlo-pink rebuttal to decades of conventional Hollywood thinking, and its success seemed to herald a new paradigm for the film industry. Movies written and directed by women and focused on female protagonists could attract enormous audiences to multiplexes around the world.
Yet in the 12 months since the movie’s release, little has changed in Hollywood. Buffeted by dual labor strikes that went on for months and a general retrenchment by entertainment companies trying to navigate the economics of the streaming era, the industry has retreated to its usual ways of doing business.
The box office is down 17 percent from last year at this time, and studios spooked by a fickle audience (yes to “Twisters,” no to “Fall Guy”) are again questioning the reliability of the theatrical marketplace. Films released in 2023 featured the same number of girls or women in a leading role as in 2010, according to a report from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. Ask around Hollywood and the consensus seems to be that “Barbie” is a singular success, a gargantuan feat helmed by particular talents, the writer-director Greta Gerwig and the star Margot Robbie. Translation: Don’t expect a lot of movies like that in theaters anytime soon.
“‘Barbie’ had no effect,” said Stacy L. Smith, the founder of the inclusion initiative, which studies inequality in Hollywood. “It’s perceived cognitively as a one-off. They have individuated the Margot Robbie, Greta Gerwig success and haven’t thought about how their own decision-making could be different and inclusive to create a new path forward.
“Like most things with this industry, they’re like, ‘Oh, this is neat and shiny,’ and then they go right back to the way they’ve always been.”
The making of “Barbie” was anything but traditional. The toy company Mattel gave Ms. Gerwig — who wrote the film with her husband, Noah Baumbach — free rein to imagine a narrative based on the titular doll, which has had plenty of detractors over the decades. The result was a $150 million film that poked fun at Barbie’s persona and the company itself. Mattel’s chief executive, Ynon Kreiz, said he was asked most frequently, “How did you let this happen?”
Warner Bros. went all in on promoting the film, aiming to make it the highest-grossing movie based on female intellectual property ever. They exceeded those goals with an expansive campaign that made “Barbie” inescapable. “The job was, how do we defy people’s expectations of what a Barbie movie could be,” said Josh Goldstine, the studio’s president of worldwide marketing.
Nothing in Hollywood happens quickly, of course, and a movie can often take years to complete. Mattel now has 16 projects in development, including a reimagining of “Barney,” with Daniel Kaluuya, and “Polly Pocket,” which is set to star Lily Collins as the doll. Lena Dunham, who wrote the script for “Polly Pocket,” dropped out of the directing job, telling The New Yorker she didn’t think she could replicate Ms. Gerwig’s success. She described “Barbie” as “candy to so many different kinds of people and was perfectly and divinely Greta.”
“We know not every movie will be the next ‘Barbie,’ but we are taking the same approach,” Mr. Kriez said.
Since the release of “Barbie,” Warner Bros., now led by the co-chairs Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca, has produced two live-action films starring women and with female directors: Ishana Shyamalan’s “The Watchers,” which flopped when it opened in theaters this summer, and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, which will be released next year. The studio has three more live-action films starring women from female directors, including Olivia Wilde, in active development. (Also, the upcoming 2027 animated movie “Bad Fairies,” with a female character in the lead, is being directed by Megan Nicole Dong.)
Warner Bros. said it would love to explore another “Barbie” film if Ms. Gerwig and Ms. Robbie were interested. The duo’s contracts for the original film did not have them on the hook to make a sequel.
Ms. Abdy and Mr. De Luca, who started at the studio after “Barbie” was greenlit by the previous president, Toby Emmerich, did sign an overall deal with Ms. Robbie’s production company, LuckyChap, which she runs with her husband, Tom Ackerley, and Josey McNamara. They even gave the trio an original key to the studio, resurrecting a tradition started by Jack Warner, one of the founders of Warner Bros.
Ms. Robbie, who also produced 2023’s “Saltburn,” from the director Emerald Fennell, said she thought the biggest hurdle with studios will be persuading them that films with women in the starring role can appeal to all audiences.
“It’s just really hard to convince people that men will show up for a female-lead film, unfortunately,” she said in an interview. “Honestly, that feels like a bigger fight than trying to convince people that a female director can make big money at the box office.”
When her producing team was arguing for a bigger budget for “Barbie” — one of the few examples of a successful film directed by a woman with a main character who was a woman was “Wonder Woman” — the producers were told it wasn’t comparable since it was in the superhero genre.
“If we’re lucky enough to be in this position again, and making a four-quadrant, big, female-led movie, you bet we will be using ‘Barbie’ as an example,” Mr. Ackerley said.
Regarding the potential for a sequel, he and Ms. Robbie wrote in a follow-up email, “Of course, the possibility is very exciting but we’ve set the bar very high for ourselves and would only engage if we thought we could accomplish something at that level.”
For the industry, which is in a duck and cover mood, applying what was learned from the success of “Barbie” may be a formidable task.
“When things are tough, you actually have to innovate,” Mr. Goldstine said. “So I think we’ve learned these lessons. And we’ve forgotten them. Hopefully, we’ll also remember them again, too.”
Amy Baer, a producer and the board president for the advocacy group Women in Film, recently shopped a high-concept comedy project that featured starring roles for an older woman and a younger woman. She said the most frequent response from studios was, “We just don’t know who it’s for.”
“It’s challenging to sell anything to a studio or a financier right now,” she said. “They want a sure bet, and that’s difficult.”
Read More: ‘Barbie’ Was Supposed to Change Hollywood. Many See ‘No Effect.’
