Life Power List 2023: Greta Gerwig triumphs at box office with Barbie

SINGAPORE – In 2023, the musical comedy Barbie was released to a world eager for a feel-good story about a doll in search of her identity.

Before its release, its trailers had excited a fandom built on the idea of capturing the perfect social media moment through cosplay and group viewings.

If your friend group could not go to the Barbie movie dressed in pink, you had to at least take a shot for Instagram posing inside the human-size doll package that popped up at cinemas and malls.

In July, the movie hit cinemas like a pink tsunami. Its American director and co-writer Greta Gerwig now holds the honour of having

helmed 2023’s biggest box-office hit.

Barbie’s US$1.44 billion (S$1.92 billion) global take makes her the highest-grossing solo woman director ever. Animated fantasy Frozen II (2019) made more – US$1.45 billion – but it was co-directed by Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck.

If Gerwig, 40, gets an Oscar nomination for directing – a laurel she is almost certain to receive – she will be the second woman after New Zealand film-maker Jane Campion to receive two nods for directing.

Gerwig began her career as an actress best known for appearing in low-budget drama-comedies seen mostly on the art-house circuit. She branched into directing, and her second attempt, the coming-of-age comedy Lady Bird (2017), was a critical and commercial hit that earned five Oscar nominations, including for Best Director and Best Picture.

The same success greeted her follow-up Little Women (2019), the adaptation of the classic novel of the same name. It picked up six Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, and won an Oscar for Best Costume Design.

Gerwig’s snub in the Best Director category that year caused a media furore, adding fuel to the campaign to reform the voting system for that category.

When it was announced that she would helm Barbie, a big-budget comedy, there were puzzled reactions. Gerwig had, after all, made her reputation with niche, mid-budget projects. Barbie’s production budget was set at around US$100 million, standard for a tent-pole movie. It eventually rose to US$128 million.

There were film-makers with better credentials, such as Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, co-directors of The Lego Movie (2014), as well as a host of others with backgrounds in animation and comedy.

But Australian actress Margot Robbie, who stars in the film and is also a producer, recommended Gerwig to Warner Bros studio and Barbie toymaker Mattel. Both groups liked what Gerwig had done with Lady Bird and Little Women.

She came on board, joining the tiny group of women who have helmed films with a budget greater than US$100 million: Chloe Zhao (Eternals, 2021), Cate Shortland (Black Widow, 2021), Niki Caro (Mulan, 2020), Ava DuVernay (A Wrinkle In Time, 2018) and Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman, 2017).

But could Gerwig work the same magic with a movie centred on an iconic doll? Could she celebrate its heritage while also addressing the debates around its impact on body image?

Could she find a middle ground between her satirical edge and the wishes of the corporations that control the final product?

The executives allowed her creative freedom, she said in interviews. She, in turn, delivered a movie in which Robbie’s Barbie lives in a paradise with Kens and other Barbies where nothing is ever bad, until she asks: “Do you guys ever think about dying?”

The movie, built on a screenplay Gerwig co-wrote with Noah Baumbach – whom she married recently and has two sons with – balances on a knife edge between satire and homage.

Boosted by the

Barbenheimer social media phenomenon,

which saw Barbie and the serious biopic Oppenheimer become a paired-viewing challenge, it shot to the top of the box-office charts.

For Gerwig, her triumphant 2023 could be best described in a line spoken by Robbie’s Barbie: “Every night is girls’ night.”