The first time we meet the Mattel CEO as played by Will Ferrell in Barbie, he’s holding pink drumsticks and waxing poetic about how to empower young girls. “When you think of sparkle, what do you think after that?” he asks a boardroom full of besuited white men. The answer, he’s delighted to share, is this: “Female agency!”
You’d be forgiven if you walked out of the movie assuming that the actual high-powered executive behind the most famous doll in the world is, in the words of Ferrell himself, a “bumbling idiot.” In Greta Gerwig’s depiction, he’s inept, likes to be tickled, and doesn’t seem to understand that trying to literally put Barbie back in her box is at odds with his aim of supporting little girls’ dreams “in the least creepy way possible.” Watching the film, I could hardly believe that Mattel and CEO Ynon Kreiz signed off on the depiction. “We embrace self-deprecation,” says Kreiz in an interview. “I thought many parts of [the movie]—especially the Will Ferrell part—were very funny, hilarious at times. We take our brands very seriously and we take what we do very seriously, but we don’t take ourselves very seriously.”
Perhaps Kreiz could sense that it would pay off to be in on the joke. In its opening weekend, Barbie earned an astonishing $162 million domestically and another $182 million abroad. It was not only the top opening of the year, but a record for a female director. “The goal was always to make something very special,” Kreiz says. “This was not about making a movie. This was about creating a cultural event that will reach, engage, and touch consumers all over the world.”
It’s doing just that. One half of what will forever be remembered as Barbenheimer (that’s Barbie and Oppenheimer, which opened on the same day and took home a combined $500 million-plus at the box office in just one weekend), Barbie has been inescapable for weeks. Kreiz tells me Mattel worked with 110 different brand partners to unleash a torrent of pink. There’s Barbie clothing at Gap, Beis Barbie luggage, and even a pink burger available for purchase at Burger King. “This has been a great partnership with Warner Bros. that brought their marketing capabilities and distribution platform, and then what we do on our end, we specialize in demand creation,” he says. “We know how to market Barbie and how to create a cultural conversation around the brand. We typically do that without a movie. When you have such a strong proposition in the marketplace, we can amplify that and create the type of excitement that you’re seeing right now globally.”
Kreiz, the Israel-born veteran of the entertainment industry who took the reins at Mattel in 2018, won’t say just how financially successful this has been for the company. (For that, you’ll have to wait for its next earnings update, currently scheduled to drop on July 26.) But he teases that “the movie-related product is selling very well.” And Barbie is about more than just selling dolls for Mattel. It’s about proving that the 78-year-old company can create a whole constellation of movies centered on its most popular toy brands.
“It’s a milestone for Mattel in terms of releasing our first theatrical release and really seeing it as a showcase for what we mean when we say we’re becoming an IP company,” says Kreiz. “It’s a showcase for the strength of our brands, and how we collaborate with creative talent and major studios to create cultural events.”