Following Barbie's Success, Mattelverse Was Announced, and We Can't Wrap Our Heads Around New UNO Movie

Ever since 2018, when Mattel executives finally realized there was no way to revive their declining toy sales, the company set out to figure out a way to enter new markets. Ynon Kreiz, the new CEO of Mattel, decided on an ambitious project of creating Mattel's own cinematic universe, essentially aiming to turn the company into the new Marvel.

Barbie was its first movie, essentially, a pilot. An immensely expensive and risky project, Greta Gerwig's adventure comedy turned out to be a massive global success: the audience loved the film, and the box office revenue in the first week was phenomenal. Following this success, Mattel decided to proceed with its plan to become a major movie industry player.

First and foremost, the execs are looking at a bunch of Barbie sequels and spin-offs to cement this franchise's place in the world. While director Gerwig stated that she wasn't planning on developing Barbie 2, the course has obviously changed since then thanks, first of all, to the whopping revenue of the film.

"In addition to the main Barbie figure, she has family, she has a lot of elements around in her universe. It's a very rich universe… It's a very broad and very elastic brand, in terms of opportunities. <...> Opportunities open up very quickly, once you establish the first movie as a successful representation of a franchise on the big screen. Successful movies lend themselves to more movies. Our ambition is to create film franchises," the CEO of Mattel told Variety.

Second of all, the company wants to broaden its horizons by creating new IPs. Wasting no time, Mattel already set 14 (!!!) new projects in motion, all of them revolving around the company's titular toys and games. The current projects of Mattel include but are not limited to movies based on: UNO, Barney, Hot Wheels, Magic 8 Ball, Polly Pocket, Thomas the Tank Engine, and many others.

While some of these ideas sound fairly logical (like Barney, Thomas, and Hot Wheels), others seemingly make no sense. How do you turn UNO, the card game for a large company, into a movie? Our best (yet completely uneducated, of course) guess is that UNO the movie will have to be an action film with two hours of footage of friend groups fighting among themselves as they can't agree on the rules of the game.

Well, anyway, whatever Mattel comes up with, it's definitely going to be interesting to watch — if not the movies themselves then the process of their making. We'll have to wait and see whether the company's new cinematic universe will follow the success of Barbie or become an utter disaster.

Source: Variety