Before Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie arrived to flood our cinemas in pink and stand up to Christopher Nolan himself with his long-awaited ‘Barbie’ —a candidate to be the great movie of summer 2023—, the iconic Mattel doll was about to have its own live action movie starring and co-written by none other than Amy Schumer.
The project ended up falling on deaf ears due to what, at the time, was attributed to a scheduling conflict due to the filming of ‘How pretty I am!’, starring Shumer herself. Now we have known the true reasons for abandonment, and they go through those “creative differences” so common in Hollywood.
Neither feminist nor cool
In the program ‘Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen’, the actress has confessed it in this way, but not before pointing out the good look which has Gerwig’s version:
“I can’t wait to see the movie, it looks amazing. I think we said it was scheduling issues, but really it was creative differences. But you know, there’s a new team behind it, and it seems very feminist and cool, so I’ll watch the movie.”
The original idea for Amy Schumer’s ‘Barbie’ saw the titular doll banished from Barbieland due to not being perfect enough. Initially, the director and Kim Carmele wrote her lead as an “ambitious inventor.” The problem came when from Sony they asked that the invention in question be… high-heeled shoes made of jelly.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Schumer went into details about:
“The idea that that’s what every woman should want…I should have said right then and there, ‘You’ve got the wrong girl.’ I felt like I was letting my team down by not being Barbie. They definitely didn’t want to do it the way the way I wanted to, the only way I was interested in doing it.
Finally, the project ended up being discarded by Sony Pictures and landed at Warner Bros. in 2018 for become a meme before its premiere and to turn the billboard of July 20 upside down; the day it will be released to compete with ‘Oppenheimer’. It’s going to be a most intense weekend, both for the box office and for our poor brains.
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