Will Hollywood learn these 5 lessons from the Barbie movie?

NEW YORK – Over the past 1½ weeks, American writer-director Greta Gerwig’s comedy film Barbie

passed the billion-dollar mark

at the global box office, and it will not be long before it overtakes The Super Mario Bros Movie to become 2023’s highest-grossing film worldwide – a title Barbie is likely to hold on to.

That is a staggering achievement in so many ways. No movie directed by a woman has topped the yearly box office, and it has been well over two decades since a live-action film without any significant action elements became the biggest movie of the year. That would be the Jim Carrey vehicle How The Grinch Stole Christmas, which ruled 2000.

But can the runaway success of Barbie reshape Hollywood? There are cynics who think studio executives will not learn all the right lessons from it. Instead, they will probably just greenlight more movies about toys. Still, Barbie has proven at least five things to be true, if decision-makers are willing to think outside the pink box.

1. A summer movie can be written smartly

Moviegoers count on summer movies to deliver spectacle, but how many also come with a witty, thoughtful script? Too often, big-budget blockbusters are rushed into production before the screenplay is finished, and they are in a constant state of flux even while shooting, with new writers clambering aboard to stitch everything into some sort of viable patchwork quilt.

Barbie, by contrast, feels totally thought through instead of frantically rewritten. Despite the outsized scale of the film, it shares a distinctive comic sensibility and offhand intellectualism with Frances Ha (2012) and Mistress America (2015), the two movies previously written by Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach, and there are actual ideas at play here that have given Barbie a conversational shelf life far longer than most summer films.

Although Barbie proves that a big movie can be both fun and thoughtful, that is likely to happen only when a studio hires smart writers, resists sanding down their sensibilities and gives them enough time and space to truly make the story sing.

2. Make more female-led event films

Although movies as varied as Bridesmaids (2011), Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and Where The Crawdads Sing (2022) have become breakout hits in recent years, they are often treated as aberrations. Peruse a typical theatrical calendar and you will find little trace of those films’ influence. Studio executives routinely take female audiences for granted, handing their biggest budgets to movies made by and starring men, because the conventional wisdom is that though women will go see those titles, male moviegoers are reluctant to watch a female-driven story.

Barbie has blown a hole in that argument. It is not that men just had no choice but to see Barbie, but the film also demonstrated how women will show up in record-breaking numbers to watch something that truly speaks to them (often taking friends and going a second or third time too). Female-led blockbusters do not all have to star a superheroine. They can be comedies, romances or dramas based on best-selling books, as long as they are presented as major events.

3. Do not rely on past-their-prime franchises

Barbie will end this summer outdrawing every major sequel. That is in part because those franchises are so long in the tooth.

Hollywood is on the seventh Mission: Impossible movie,

the 10th Fast And Furious and the fifth Indiana Jones. Younger audiences have no sense of ownership over those older series, and long-time fans may be experiencing diminishing returns.

If any lasting lesson can be drawn from the

Barbenheimer phenomenon

that sent Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer soaring past their initial projections, it is that audiences are eager for big movies that feel genuinely new. Films that stoke their curiosity can be more potent than old reliables.

4. A great soundtrack is effective marketing

Although studios will explore every possible method to market a movie – from billboards to Instagram advertisements to Happy Meals at McDonald’s – there are few tie-ins as potent as a killer soundtrack.

Big summer movies used to be counted on to deliver radio hits, but loaded soundtrack albums have become few and far between these days, despite films such as The Greatest Showman (2017) and Black Panther (2018) amply demonstrating the boost a film can get from an album that people cannot stop playing.

It is nice, then, that the Barbie soundtrack is filled with bops, such as Dua Lipa’s Dance The Night and Barbie World by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice. Billie Eilish’s What Was I Made For? is destined to make the shortlist for the original song Oscar, and Barbie leading man Ryan Gosling’s plaintive power ballad I’m Just Ken debuted on Billboard’s Hot 100.

In an era when TikTok has become a music industry hitmaker and virality on that platform can rival any paid marketing push, a fun pop soundtrack like the one Barbie boasts is worth its weight in rose gold.

5. Stop saving the good stuff for the sequel

With Barbie on a path to become 2023’s highest-grossing movie worldwide, Warner Bros will inevitably try to conjure a franchise from it. Yet, much of what makes Barbie feel fresh is that it tells a complete story and does not spend time setting up spin-offs or sequels.

In fact, it ends in a place that would be hard to roll back: with its lead at the definitive end of her character arc. Gerwig and her stars are not signed for Barbie sequels, and she has famously said she had put every idea she had into this movie without the thought of doing more.

A Barbie sequel would certainly make money, but there is no way it could capture the lightning-in-a-bottle moment that makes this movie feel like such a collector’s item.

Would Warner Bros and Mattel have the guts to preserve the value of Barbie by letting it stand on its own? As a top-tier legacy title undiluted by shoddy sequels, it could continue to generate untold amounts of revenue in the years to come.

So, although it is unlikely that studio heads will choose common sense over cynical cash grabs, the idea of Barbie as a one-and-done deserves consideration. After all, a toy lasts forever only if you know when to put it away. NYTIMES