Photo by Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture – © 2023 – Warner Bros
Is a sequel in the works for Barbie, the blockbuster movie from 2023 that earned $1.4 billion at the global box office?
According to a story by The Hollywood Reporter, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, the husband-and-wife team that co-wrote the Barbie script, are now in the “early stages” of developing another film about the iconic doll for Warner Bros. However, representatives for both the studio and the filmmakers have declared that THR’s reporting is inaccurate. A spokesperson for Gerwig and Baumbach said, flatly, that “There is no legitimacy to this reporting.”
Gerwig and Baumbach, who had earlier collaborated on the scripts for Mistress America and Frances Ha, are currently enmeshed in other projects. Baumbach is in postproduction for a yet-untitled movie that will be released next year by Netflix. It stars Gerwig, George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Jim Broadbent, Patrick Wilson and co-writer Emily Mortimer. Meanwhile, Gerwig is in preproduction for another Netflix project, an adaptation of the Chronicles of Narnia.
No details have been released about the storyline for any upcoming sequel. In October 2023, Gerwig participated in a Writers Guild of America panel discussion in which she said: “I find whenever I’ve shared ideas too early, they become bad, then the movie’s not going to be any good. I don’t like to talk about things too early or pitch things or show treatments too early because it feels like it’s gonna somehow wreck what the movie is.”
Paying tribute to Gerwig’s talent, Margot Robbie, who portrayed Barbie in the 2023 film, said in February that “She cracked the code on this film, as only she could. It is such a singular vision, and Greta brought so much humanity, creativity, inspiration, magic and joy to [the film]”
In a review of Barbie, Lovia Gyarkye wrote how. “Gerwig delights in the richness and weirdness of her material in this clever send-up of Barbie dolls and their fraught legacy. It’s impressive how much the director, known for her shrewd and narratively precise dramas, has fit into a corporate movie.”
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