Barbie 2 has to happen? Only a very distracted executive would let it slip away, but the sequel to the blockbuster with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, directed by Greta Gerwig, is bogged down in Warner Bros. Discovery’s transition into the Paramount Skydance powerhouse, a colossal operation just approved. A metaphorical tugboat is about to free it from the mud, especially since, as we already knew, there is a countdown: if it is not approved by December, it could be scrapped entirely, at least with that team and this setup. Variety has updates on the situation.
Paramount Skydance is not opposing Barbie 2, quite the opposite
The Barbie sequel should be approved by the end of December, i.e., with contracts signed and preproduction underway. The director Greta Gerwig and her husband and co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach appear to already have a plan for Barbie 2, but rumors suggest the project stalled because the departing Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav considered it too expensive so far. It seems the wind is poised to shift decisively, because the new Warner within the Paramount Skydance family follows different rules: it isn’t the moment to belt-tighten when the spotlight is trained on the cuts the nascent empire could impose during its adjustment, so there is actually a willingness to accelerate. Now that Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca have announced their departure from the presidency of Warner Bros. Pictures, all of the group’s film operations will be overseen by Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, already leading Paramount Pictures; the latter would have already reached out to Robbie in her capacity as producer for Barbie 2 (and of course in her Barbie role). “There is no such thing as Barbie 2 not happening” an anonymous source would have said, all the more because Ellison chose as his co-CEO of Paramount-Warner the former Mattel boss Ynon Kriez.
A project that cost around $130-140 million (per Deadline and the New York Times) raked in a remarkable $1,448,000,000 in 2023: it can be relaunched, even though contracts with the interested parties will need renegotiation, because the original deals did not anticipate sequels. If, by December, Barbie 2 isn’t a done deal, the film rights would revert to Mattel, which could produce films with other companies, but without ties to what was created for Warner, effectively starting from scratch. And commercially, nobody wants this unfortunate scenario to unfold.
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