Anthony Nash
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Before Greta Gerwig was chosen to write and direct the upcoming Barbie movie, Juno writer Diablo Cody was tabbed with writing it. According to her, the project was vastly different than what it is now.
Why did Diablo Cody’s Barbie film not materialize?
Speaking to GQ magazine, Cody spoke about her time developing a Barbie movie alongside actress and comedian Amy Schumer. In 2018, Cody exited the project, infamously noting that she was “literally incapable” of turning in a script for the project. According to her, she thinks it’s because at the time, people wanted a very different Barbie movie.
“I think I know why I s— the bed,” Cody said. “When I was first hired for this, I don’t think the culture had not embraced the femme or the bimbo as valid feminist archetypes yet. If you look up ‘Barbie’ on TikTok you’ll find this wonderful subculture that celebrates the feminine, but in 2014, taking this skinny blonde white doll and making her into a heroine was a tall order.”
Cody went on to say that the “idea of an anti-Barbie” movie made sense a decade ago, and that Sony Pictures wanted “a girl-boss feminist twist on Barbie” instead of something more faithful.
“That idea of an anti-Barbie made a lot of sense given the feminist rhetoric of 10 years ago,” said Cody. “I didn’t really have the freedom then to write something that was faithful to the iconography; they wanted a girl-boss feminist twist on Barbie, and I couldn’t figure it out because that’s not what Barbie is.”
Cody also noted that the hit 2014 film The Lego Movie cast a big shadow over the development of Barbie. According to the writer, any meta approach or joke that Cody took was seen as too close to The Lego Movie, although Cody joked that now we’re far enough removed from the film to have Will Ferrell — who was the antagonist of The Lego Movie — star in Barbie.
“I heard endless references to The Lego Movie in development,” Cody said. “And it created a problem for me because they had done it so well. Any time I came up with something meta, it was too much like what they had done. It was a roadblock for me, but now enough time has passed that they can just cast [‘The Lego Movie’ antagonist] Will Ferrell as the antagonist in a real-life Barbie movie and nobody cares.”
Barbie is set to premiere on July 21, 2023.