Yahoo News Diablo Cody explains how she 's--- the bed' with her scrapped Barbie script
Diablo Cody is pulling back the pink curtains on her ill-fated attempt at writing a Barbie movie.
The Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter had been part of the writing team behind Sony's big-screen Barbie project, which was to star Amy Schumer. But Cody departed the film in 2018, a year after Schumer's own exit. (Cody told Screen Crush at the time, "I failed so hard at that project. I was literally incapable of turning in a Barbie draft. God knows I tried.") Now Cody is looking back on what went wrong ahead of the release of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie's movie based on the iconic Mattel doll.
"I think I know why I s--- the bed," she said in new GQ interview. "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. 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."
Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images; Warner Bros. Pictures Diablo Cody; Margot Robbie in 'Barbie'
Sony's vision to pair her idiosyncratic writing with a crass comedian like Schumer was better in theory than execution, Cody said. "That idea of an anti-Barbie made a lot of sense given the feminist rhetoric of ten years ago," she said. "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."
Schumer revealed last month that she departed the Barbie movie due to creative differences, despite initial claims of scheduling conflicts. The project didn't "feel feminist or cool," she told Andy Cohen, adding that she couldn't wait to watch Gerwig and Robbie's movie, which Warner Bros. will release July 21. Though Anne Hathaway had been in talks to replace Schumer, the creative team had hit a roadblock, and Cody attributed some of that to the success of the The Lego Movie.
"I heard endless references to The Lego Movie in development and it created a problem for me because they had done it so well," she told GQ. "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 [Lego Movie antagonist] Will Ferrell as the antagonist in a real-life Barbie movie and nobody cares."
Like Schumer, Cody is excited to see Barbie, which she humorously referred to as "my Joker." The movie follows Robbie's titular Barbie as she experiences an existential crisis and embarks on a journey from Barbie Land to the real world in search of answers.
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