Diablo Cody Reveals Why She “Failed So Hard” at Writing a ‘Barbie’ Movie

The already behemoth Barbie movie that’s set to color the summer box office season pink had a long and twisty road to the big screen. Before filmmaker Greta Gerwig and star Margot Robbie entered Barbieland, there were abandoned versions of the project featuring Anne Hathaway and Amy Schumer—ones that barely got out of their plastic packaging before being cast aside. At one point, Diablo Cody, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Juno, was tapped to write such an iteration. This week, she shared with GQ why she “shit the bed” on writing the script.

“When I was first hired for this, I don’t think the culture had not embraced the femme or the bimbo as valid feminist archetypes yet,” Cody explained. “If you look up ‘Barbie’ on TikTok you’ll find this wonderful subculture that celebrates the feminine. But in 2014, taking this skinny blonde white doll and making her into a heroine was a tall order.”

The writer behind prickly female-led films like Young Adult and Tully said she set out to make “an anti-Barbie” that “made a lot of sense given the feminist rhetoric of ten years ago.” But corporate and studio oversight prevented Cody from fully realizing her vision. “I didn’t really have the freedom then to write something that was faithful to the iconography; they wanted a girl-boss feminist twist on Barbie, and I couldn’t figure it out because that’s not what Barbie is,” she said.

“I failed so hard at that project,” she previously told Screen Crush, after departing Barbie without ever turning in a pass on the script. “I was literally incapable of turning in a Barbie draft. God knows I tried.”

Five years later, Cody cites another IP-driven blockbuster as an obstacle in Barbie’s stride. “I heard endless references to The Lego Movie in development,” she said, “and it created a problem for me because they had done it so well. Any time I came up with something meta, it was too much like what they had done. It was a roadblock for me, but now enough time has passed that they can just cast [The Lego Movie antagonist] Will Ferrell as the antagonist in a real-life Barbie movie and nobody cares.”

During Cody’s time with the project, she crossed paths with Schumer, who parted ways with the lead role in 2016 due to “scheduling conflicts.” But in a recent interview on Watch What Happens Live, Schumer confirmed to Andy Cohen that she left because the version of the film being imposed on her didn’t feel “feminist and cool.” When asked about Schumer’s remark in a Time magazine cover story, Richard Dickson, COO and president of Mattel, said only: “It was a matter of finding the right talent that can appreciate the brand’s authenticity and bring that controversy to life in a way that, yes, pokes fun at us but ultimately is purposeful and has heart.”

In that same piece, it is reported that multiple Mattel execs claimed the Barbie movie wasn’t feminist, and Gerwig herself admitted that “sometimes these movies can have a quality of hegemonic capitalism.”

Cody acknowledged that creative tightrope in her GQ interview. “I have made several swings at IP with Barbie and Powerpuff Girls, and I take full responsibility for the failures of those attempts, because I do have a specific voice and POV and I haven’t figured out how to modulate it,” she said. (A Cody-penned Powerpuff series at The CW that got reimagined back in 2021 was officially cancelled last month.) “Ultimately, you’re selling toys. I mean, nobody really wants to delve deeper into the lore and mythos of Hungry Hungry Hippos. That’s not really an artistic exercise.”