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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> In fact, the report not only notes that it will be a comedy—it says it will be a musical, too.

Barbie succeeded because it paired talented performers with a talented auteur director who had a lot of control over the production, not because they licensed a property and made it into a comedy with musical numbers in it. Just felt that needed to be said.

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But surely Barbie does nowhere near as well if it doesn’t have the Barbie IP. The movie plays largely as a parody of Barbie anyway, so it’s very easy to imagine nearly the exact same movie with a find/replace on a few trademarks in the screenplay and logos on screen. And I think that movie would have had a niche audience that adores it, but wouldn’t have broken out into the phenomenon we saw.

It's also worth noting that this was almost handed to Amy Schumer and not Margot Robbie (who actively spearheaded pitching the project alongside Greta Gerwig), which is probably the difference between making a mockery of the project and giving it the love it needs to survive despite being branded bilk.

What do you mean by bilk? Are you saying Gerwig cheated the Mattel somehow? Or Mattel cheated Gerwig?

No, nothing like that—I'm saying that people generally deserve better than recycled IP, and Mattel came very close to people realizing this (yet again) by not choosing Robbie/Gerwig (and if you look at the story of how this movie came to be, Robbie was at least as big a factor as Gerwig was).

And if you want to a satire/comedy/musical of the game as a show, it's been done. See The Trail to Oregon! by Team StarKid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxKCX-UvPrI

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