Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach found themselves in the odd position of having to aggressively deny their own creativity tonight: The husband-and-wife team (who co-wrote the script for Gerwig's massive 2023 blockbuster Barbie) are denying that they've cooked up an idea they're happy with for a sequel to the bright pink pop satire, and have pitched it to Warner Bros. Warner Bros. is also denying the scurrilous allegations, published in The Hollywood Reporter, that they'd very much like to make a sequel to a movie that made $1.4 billion off an IP that had previously been relegated pretty much exclusively to direct-to-DVD shovelware. "There is no legitimacy to this reporting," Gerwig and Baumbach's rep said in response to baseless accusations of a good idea, and early talks about getting a movie made. Warner Bros. seemed outraged by the very idea.
All of which sounds pretty much like the kind of language people use when there's no deal in place yet, but that just might be the money of it all talking: After all, it's hard to imagine there won't be a Barbie 2 sometime. It's just the nature of modern Hollywood, where they don't let you make that much money with a film without pushing, hard, to generate a sequel. And while you can fight back against the process—arguably, what Todd Phillips did by making a Joker sequel specifically designed to piss off everybody who liked his first movie—it doesn't feel like Gerwig is necessarily the type. (Although an obvious indie darling, Gerwig has never been afraid of studio fare; she's talked in interviews about her interest in working with the studio machine to tell stories, rather than railing against it, and is in pre-production right now on her Netflix Narnia movie.)
If Gerwig and Baumbach did have an idea for a Barbie 2, we'd normally greet it with at least a bit of the skepticism traditionally reserved for kneejerk sequels. But Gerwig has earned a fair amount of benefit of the doubt over the last several years; the films leading up to the billion dollar explosion were pretty uniformly great, and Barbie itself threaded the needle between goofball comedy and social satire well enough that we're convinced she and Baumbach will probably found something to say with a sequel that's slightly more profound than "We'd like another billion dollars, please." If they had an idea they're happy with, which, they want you to know, they don't.
