Barbie director Greta Gerwig doesn’t not say there might be a Ken spin-off movie… But she doesn’t not say there won’t be one, either. Hope that’s clear.
He might just be Ken, but Ryan Gosling's smooth-groined man-child captured the hearts (and wallets) of the world when Greta Gerwig's Barbie triple-somersaulted to box office success earlier this year. There’s even a risk that Gosling’s performance rather overshadowed the film’s real star (Margot Robbie deserves much more credit than she’s been getting for pulling off arguably the more difficult part with aplomb), but we’ll put that soapbox away for another time.
Because, as is often the case with $1.4bn original movies, sequel and spin-off talk has been following Barbie around for a while. Though Robbie has previously said a straight-up Barbie 2 was unlikely (“I think we put everything into this one. We didn’t build it to be a trilogy or something”, she told the Associated Press) people just keep asking Greta Gerwig if there might be more fantastic plastic fun to come.
“I mean, the truth is, you know…I guess we’ll see,” Gerwig told Sharyn Alfonsi during a 60 Minutes interview. Crucially for Ken-friends (and movie magazine headline writers) across the world, that isn’t strictly a no…
At the same time, there are plenty of reasons why a Ken film might not be on its way any time soon. The first, and most important, is Greta Gerwig’s already packed schedule (she’s already working on a pair of Narnia movies for Netflix), and the question of whether a distinctive director like her would want to tie herself into a long-running Barbie/Ken franchise.
Margot Robbie, this time in producer mode, also doesn’t seem keen to progress without the director. “If it wasn’t going to be Greta, then, yeah, this could have been an absolute disaster”, she told Variety this week.
There would also be a certain irony in a film about life as a woman in the 21st century spawning a spin-off about its most prominent main character before a female-led follow-up, but… Nope, we’ll put that soapbox away for now too. Safe to say, though, that Warner Bros are presumably aware that that might not be a great look.
On the other hand, Ryan Gosling is very good in Barbie – we’ll just have to wait and see if we get more of him.
