“Barbie” introduced a new trend that may come to dominate American cinema in coming years: films adapted not from books or plays, but from toys. Since the pink-coated blockbuster graced screens in the summer of 2023, many new toy-based projects have been announced by Mattel and its competitors. Mattel has 14 films in development, including projects based on American Girl dolls, Hot Wheels, Uno and even the Magic 8 Ball. Hasbro and Electronic Arts, meanwhile, are collaborating with Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap production company to produce a Monopoly movie and a Sims movie respectively.
But what are the specific forces fueling this trend? The renaissance of the ‘toy movie’ arguably began with “The LEGO Movie” franchise that hit theaters in 2014, yet, although it spawned a sequel and two spin-offs, the wild success of this movie didn’t motivate other toy brands to follow suit. What did motivate the switch is cratering profit margins, which were exacerbated by the pandemic but are propagated by the momentous switch from traditional toys to video games and iPads. Kids just aren’t as interested in playing with action figures and model trains anymore — why would they be when they can simulate something far more stimulating and realistic on a screen?
Because digital-era kids are no longer captivated by Polly Pocket and her declining progeny, toy companies are making a concerted effort to play to an 18–49 market and their sense of nostalgia. CEOs have realized their most valuable asset isn’t toys at all: It’s intellectual property. Product sales and mass entertainment have always interacted, and toy companies have realized that, say, a Super Mario Bros. movie can not only generate a huge amount of revenue, but can motivate moviegoers to step back into stores. Add this realization to the fact that the film industry, thanks to the pandemic, the strikes, the effects of streaming and the rise of competing forms of media, is in a particularly vulnerable position right now, and you have a lifeline for both industries in the form of toy-based blockbusters. In the modern American landscape, corporations are people, too, and brands can be movie stars.
I have to admit I’m cynical about the whole thing. “Barbie,” at its core, consisted of a very simple formula. You take an instantly recognizable, iconic brand, add some kind of palatable social lesson, in this case a treatise on third-wave feminism, and a couple bankable stars, cook on high heat via the simple instrument of a marketing budget in the hundreds of millions, and voilà, you have a new type of franchise designed to help mass culture limp through the digital age. Soon we’re going to see Mr. Monopoly deliver us a treatise on capitalism and the American Dream (which I would actually be okay with, but only if Daniel Day-Lewis plays the titular character and does so in the exact same way he played Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood” (2007), except with a monocle), the Sims deal with the paradox of free will, the Hot Wheels cars confront global warming or, God forbid, a millennial Polly Pocket going through a quarter-life crisis she self-medicates with Hinge, mimosas and avocado toast. And, unless we get some fresh blood in the film industry soon, we will be fully doomed to an era where we go to theaters not to see art or even human stars, but to see the same brands we’re already surrounded by in the supermarket aisle. People say blockbusters like “Barbie” are ‘escapist,’ but they reflect the very economic system we’re supposedly trying to escape from.
Ironically, the rise of IP as a product is both a coping mechanism for and a symptom of the digital age and the transformation of capitalism we’re seeing as a result of it. Over the last decade, everything has become digitized and abstracted to such an extent that we hardly know what we’re buying anymore. What is Hasbro selling you, a product or an idea? Can you even own something anymore, or can you only subscribe to it?
