The 5 Hallmarks of a Greta Gerwig Movie

We’re all just Greta Gerwig girls, living in Greta Gerwig’s world. The filmmaker has officially ascended to the A-list of directors with “Barbie,” her third directorial effort. The existential comedy adapted from the Mattel doll line is one of the biggest movies of 2023, and is set to cross the line to $1 billion at the global box office. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a legitimate cultural phenomenon, getting everyone talking about its feminist themes and launching memes and viral trends.

The success of “Barbie” is a turning point for Gerwig, who across three films, has only seen the budget and scale available to her grow at an exponential rate. Once best known as a character actor — including co-directing Joe Swanberg’s mumblecore film “Nights and Weekends” — Gerwig made her proper solo directorial debut with 2017’s “Lady Bird.” Inspired (but not based!) on her childhood growing up in Sacramento, California, the film starred Saoirse Ronan as a temperamental, immature teenager slowly learning to grow-up over the course of one dramatic school year, and was received rapturously as one of the best films of its year.

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“Lady Bird” was a small indie with a $10 million production budget, and distributed by indie label A24 right as it was becoming the brand it is today. And the film was a success, more than earning back its budget back with a $79 million gross. For her next effort, Gerwig teamed with Sony Pictures and got handed a $40 million budget to adapt Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” for the big screen. Her version of the classic 1868 novel — again featuring Ronan in the lead — was another major success, grossing $218 worldwide.

And now, with “Barbie,” which she wrote with her romantic partner and frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach, Gerwig has directed a true blockbuster, and she’s venturing further into studio filmmaking because of it. Her next film is a two part adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ classic children’s fantasy novel series “The Chronicles of Narnia.” The movie’s will likely be even bigger than Barbie (budget-wise, at least), signaling the director is making a full career move into franchise cinema. Hopefully, she’ll continue to bring her signature vision to that brave new world.

At first glance, all three of the films Gerwig has so far released don’t have a ton of commonalities: a grounded teen dramedy, a period drama, and a fantasy adaptation of a toy line does not an obvious triple feature make. But Gerwig is a distinct writer, with a clear vision and style that permeates from every movie that she releases. Her films are stories about identity, where the leads wrestle with who they are, and take tentative steps to who they want to be. And Gerwig’s singular background, as a mumblecore actor and indie darling, informs how she puts together the films that carry her name. Read on for a list of the trademark elements that make a Greta Gerwig film, a Greta Gerwig film.

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