It’s A Barbie World, Kinda

At the time of writing, the new Greta Gerwig directed Barbie movie has made over 1.4 billion dollars, which is getting close to Dr Evil type money.

Is the movie industry looking at what happened and making smart informed decisions about giving creative and talented people the opportunity to showcase their skill?

Nope.

They are thinking what matters is brand and IP and there are already many moves in the works based on other Mattel products.

Why do they do this? Purely fear. They can’t handle the ambiguity of philosophy so they look for formulas.

Let’s go back to the beginning, well not the actual beginning, but to

Iron Man

The start of the Marvel juggernaut (I know technically it was the Hulk but really it started with Iron Man)

The whole process of making the film was improvised. They had an idea of what they wanted and they made decisions moving forward with that idea in mind.

This meant that they didn’t have a plan of what to do, but they had an idea of where they were going.

Jeff Bridges talked about it being a $200 million student film because things were constantly changing.

Then You Make Billions

Then it became a huge success and the powers that be want to do it again. Money is fun, you made some money, and you want to make more. It feels very logical.

Do they look at the creativity, the play, the purpose, no.

That is too risky.

If something worked then you want to re-engineer it backwards to make a formula of how it works.

The trouble is that how it worked forward is philosophical and how it works backwards is formulaic.

Recipes Work For A Reason

When they were making Iron Man they didn’t think to do this at this time, then this at this time, jokes, action scenes, paint by numbers. They didn’t have any plans. They made it up on the fly.

How do you make a formula out of this?

The answer is you don’t.

A formula works when all of the variables are accounted for. That is why you go to the same restaurant and you get the same experience. Because they figured that out.

The problem with innovating is that by definition there is no formula. You have to try things.

More importantly, the environment is shifting so what worked once won’t have the same impact.

It is also why being labelled formulaic is an insult to an artist.

Philosophy vs Formula

To do anything new you have to journey into the unknown. So it is all philosophical. You have to tell a story about what the world might be like in the future.

Then you work towards making it.

Along the way, you learn a bunch of things. Lots of these things can be turned into a process so you can get repeatable outcomes.

However, over time these processes will need to be updated and you will need to go back to being philosophical about a new world you want to create.

Everything has changed since last time so you can’t look back and make it work, you have to start where you stand and move forward.