Jono, Ben & Megan - The Podcast - ENTY gives the latest on the Barbie movie.

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

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The Hits, with the Jono and Ben podcast. Cheers to Dilma, making the world a better tea. Hollywood, our friend Enty in America. Hey Enty, Barbie movie, a billion dollars, that's a lot of money for pink paint. I mean a billion, I mean that's, I think it's the sixth Warner Brothers movie, the sixth or the eighth, to cross the billion dollar mark.

So think about that, think about all the Warner Brothers movies, to only, to be in that rarefied company. And Greta Gerwig is the best solo female director of all time. When you've got a billion dollar movie out there and it's an original property, all of a sudden you're going to get a whole bunch of stuff, a whole bunch of stuff. But you're also going to get more scrutiny. And Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, not the most ideal of couples. You know, I mean, they were cheating while his wife was pregnant, like eight months pregnant or something like that. Is this Greta, the director's partner?

Yeah, Noah Baumbach. Noah Baumbach left his pregnant missus. Yeah, for Greta. And then, yeah, so he worked on Barbie with her. And then there was the whole thing about the homeless people that were used in the Barbie movies background and extras and stuff like that. And she refused to pay them or even give them food

or anything like that. What, along Venus Beach? Yeah. Ah, we used them as extras in the back of our shop. We didn't give them anything either. Yeah, but you didn't make a billion dollar movie. No, that's true. No, we definitely did not. Now, a sequel.

Surely they've got a writer's room happening at the moment going, how can we spin this off? Well, maybe not yet, because no one can write anything, but they definitely will, right? I mean, they have to, which is going to be a tragic shame, because why can't you just leave one? Because it's never going to have the same magic. It's never going to have the same people doing the same things

and people going to see it two and three and four times. That's just not going to happen anymore. But also the thing is Mattel is trying to sell all these other things, like Polly Pocket is the big thing right now that everybody's talking about, and Lena Dunham is kind of in charge of that one. But, you know, Mattel is just every kind of Mattel property. What can we do? What can we do? It's kind of like Disney just takes all their cartoons

and now they're making live action ones. They don't have any original ideas. So it's just superheroes and let's turn our cartoons into live action. And now it's let's make a Mattel toy movie. And that'll turn into let's make a Milton Bradley movie. Hey, let's make a Monopoly movie. Hey, let's make, we already made a Clue movie, but let's try it again.

Maybe this time it'll work. Remember they did bloody battleships with Rihanna? That's right. They did battleships with Rihanna, yeah. Scrabble the movie. Do you know in New Zealand, it's not an amazing fact, but it's Cluedo and not Clue. In America

it's like the big mystery is finding where the dough went on Cluedo the game. Oh, you just call it Clue. Yeah, it's just Clue. In America, it's like the big mystery is finding where the dough went on Cluedo, the game. Yeah, it's Clue. Oh, you just call it Clue. It's Clue over there, yeah. Yeah, it's just Clue. And like the movie, it's just Clue, yeah. Where's the dough?

Yeah, well, that's the mystery. That's the mystery you've got to find. Hey, Ante, interesting that you talk about that, Barb, because a friend of ours we work with, he went and saw it over the weekend, and he was like, oh, it was okay. And he put it down to the fact that there had been so much hype built up, whereas when Ben and I went there, we went in going, this is going to be an absolute pig. I definitely didn't think it was going to be a pig.

You were like, this is going to be a pink pig. I just didn't know what to expect. I didn't know if it was going to be a kids movie, I didn't know what it was, but actually I felt like it was more for adults than kids. Yeah, I think it was more for adults, way for adults and uh but the thing is there's a lot of adults i knew that were really looking forward to it yeah and for whatever reason it didn't click with them like they were really really excited about it like counting down the days until it

came out and then it just didn't do it for them and then other people who like i'll just go you know with my kids or whatever and they ended up loving it yeah so it doesn't surprise me that your friend was like, oh, it's so hyped up, because at some point you're like, okay, is it really that great? And there's been movies like that where it was like, I didn't really like it, but I really can't say anything. And every once in a while, like an Academy Award winning picture

will be like that, and you go, man, it really wasn't that good. Is there something wrong with me? You know, that kind of thing. Yeah. But it was, we were talking about this yesterday. It is and was a masterclass in marketing. Like the amount of money that they put into marketing, you could do a case study on how well it's worked for them.

Yeah, and don't forget also they were bumping up against, you know, an actor's strike or something like that. And so they really, they went out early and they went out hard. It was just, it was great. Just think about the first photo that you saw, like after they filmed it and everything, the first marketing thing was just the pink high heel, right? That's all it was. And that was brilliant.

You know, just the, just the one pink high heel and you just kind of knew what it was. And what they also did was when they were filming a venice beach they did that first right they did all the filming event at speech and everybody saw all the like paparazzi photos and photos that people were posting to social media brian gosling and margot robbie and it got people excited even when they were at day three of filming yeah that's what got us excited we were talking about that photo yeah no it was a really really genius rollout that's for sure