Illumination Wants to Give Barbie the Minions Treatment
Following the surprise box-office success of Despicable Me 4, which has made almost $810 million worldwide, and the smash spring 2023 hit The Super Mario Bros. Movie, rumors are swirling that the Minion makers (aka Illumination) might be capitalizing on Barbiemania.
The tittle-tattle in Tinseltown about Mattel's blonde bombshell — and, as we discovered last summer, multi-billion dollar blockbuster bait — is as follows: Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri has apparently been chatting with Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz about joining forces and making a Barbie animated franchise in the same vein as The Super Mario Bros. Movie. (Take this all with a grain of salt — or, since we're talking Barbie, a grain of glitter — because the unconfirmed reports come from Puck's Hollywood scooper Matthew Belloni and his two unnamed sources.)
Nevertheless, if the industry tea is true, it’s certainly intriguing— for one thing, this isn’t the first time Barbie has been animated. Real Barbie girls, guys and theys know that Barbie has been a fixture in the toonverse for decades. There are at least 39 Barbie animated movies out there, but while some of them have funny kid-friendly gaffes here and there, none of them are in the comedy genre. The only exception to this rule is the animated TV series Barbie Life in the Dreamhouse, which offers five seasons of genuine hilarity in the plastic doll’s daily goings-on (currently available to stream on Netflix).
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And, of course, there's the awkwardness this could stir up between Warners Bros. and Mattel. Warner Bros. proved it had what it took to bring Barbie to the big screen, transforming the over-the-top technicolor film into the must-see movie event of the summer.
Why would Mattel eye Universal’s Illumination, then, and not Warner Bros. (which has its own, albeit controversy-riddled, animation division)? Belloni’s sources don’t make those details clear, but they do add that apparently Barbie's filmmakers Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie “aren’t thrilled” with Mattel’s wandering eye.