Last month, Robbie Brenner and a team of Mattel executives made the trek to the Sundance Film Festival. For five days, they braved thin mountain air to get a sense of the emerging filmmakers who they could enlist to make movies and shows based on Mattel’s line of toys — a collection of childhood favorites that runs the gamut from Hot Wheels to Thomas the Tank Engine to He-Man.
“Sundance is where the future is,” says Brenner, who serves as president of Mattel Films. “We’re trying to get in on the ground floor with these great artists before they become the next Christopher Nolan.”
Sundance, a festival known for embracing rebels and iconoclasts, seems like an odd place to find the right director to oversee the next American Girl movie. But Brenner made a bold choice when she tapped Greta Gerwig, a filmmaker known for sensitively wrought coming-of-age movies like “Little Women” and “Ladybird,” to oversee an exuberantly pink movie adaptation of “Barbie.” Gerwig maintained the character’s sweetness in a way that pleased the Barbie faithful, while giving the movie a subversive edge that thrilled audiences who didn’t grow up with Skipper, Ken and the rest of the Malibu crew. The film went on to earn an Oscar best picture nomination while grossing nearly $1.5 billion worldwide.
“‘Barbie’ was a proof of concept,” Brenner says. “It let people in the industry know that we’re here, we mean business and we want to set the bar high.”
Taking risks is second nature to Brenner, who spent much of her career outside the mainstream, producing indie films such 2013’s “Dallas Buyers Club.” She was surprised when Ynon Kreiz, Mattel’s CEO, reached out to her more than six years ago to get her thoughts on how the company could break into Hollywood. “It was the furthest thing from my mind to take a job like this,” she says. “It fell out of the sky. I was in my producing space, trying to make movies that spoke to me and that mattered.”
Mattel licensed “Masters of the Universe” for a Dolph Lundgren action pic in 1987. Now the company is co-producing a fresh live-action take on the franchise set for release next year. An ad from the Oct 22, 1986, edition of weekly Variety
But over a meal at the Polo Lounge, the two discovered they had a passion for telling stories, as well as a shared tenacity. “He needed somebody that had an entrepreneurial spirit,” Brenner says. “I’m the kind of person where the door can close on me 1,000 times and I’m still knocking on it. You have to do that in independent film.”
Mattel has capitalized on “Barbie’s” success, announcing more than a dozen film and TV projects. It enlisted Travis Knight, a director known for helming stop-motion animation films like “Kubo and the Two Strings,” to bring Castle Grayskull to life with “Masters of the Universe,” which began shooting in February.
“It’s utterly unique — from the color scheme to the characters to the tone — but it also has a classic hero’s journey,” Brenner teases.
There’s also a Matchbox movie with John Cena that’s currently filming in Budapest, and a long list of projects in various stages of development. They include a Polly Pocket film with Lily Collins, a Bob the Builder adaptation with Anthony Ramos, a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots adventure with Vin Diesel and Tom Hanks playing Major Matt Mason. The goal is to give the filmmakers behind the projects artistic license — with a few parameters.
“We’re not going to make an R-rated movie,” she says. “We don’t need curse words or sex or extreme violence. Beyond that, we’re very open.”
Even if all these movies are hits, they are unlikely to be the same kind of zeitgeisty smashes as “Barbie.”
“Barbie was an absolute unicorn,” she says. “Will that ever happen again? I hope. But all the stars aligned perfectly on that. I have to keep my head down and not think about the success of ‘Barbie.’ I have to think about making each movie distinctive.”
