With Barbie, Margot Robbie has conquered Hollywood. What’s next?
Barbie is a global smash. But it’s not just for her starring role that Margot Robbie should be earning raves.
By Karl Quinn
Queen Margot: Barbie has confirmed the Australian actress’s cachet as a leading woman - but it has also proven her nous as a producer.Credit: REUTERS/Maja Smiejkowska
Amid the global onslaught of pinkness that is the Mattel-Warner Bros marketing machine, it has been virtually impossible to miss the fact that Margot Robbie is the star of a little movie called Barbie. Much easier to miss is the equally important fact that the Queensland-born and raised actress is also one of the producers of one of the biggest box-office hits of the year.
The production company behind Barbie is Lucky Chap Entertainment, founded by Robbie, Josey McNamara, Tom Ackerley and Robbie’s childhood friend Sophia Kerr in 2014.
Barbie, their sixth feature, is by far their biggest success to date. And it is, in a very real sense, a homegrown hit.
Robbie met Ackerley and McNamara on the set of Suite Francaise in mid-2013. The men were assistant directors on the World War II romantic drama starring Michelle Williams, and Robbie had a supporting role.
Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken.
The following January, according to Variety, the three got drunk together at the London premiere of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, the film that put Robbie on Hollywood’s radar. They had so much fun they decided to set up a share house in Clapham, south London, recruiting Kerr as the fourth housemate. In 2016, Ackerley and Robbie married.
Lucky Chap was born at their kitchen table, driven by Robbie’s desire to create her own work. “She would read scripts and say, ‘I want to play that character, but it’s a guy — how do I self-generate?’,” McNamara told the trade publication a few years ago.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in December 2020, after the journal had anointed Lucky Chap film producers of the year, Robbie expanded on those early ambitions.
“We never started a company to be a starring vehicle for me or to be a platform for me to chase my dreams,” she said. “It was really that we wanted to expand what female stories and female storytellers could do in this industry, and I don’t need to be onscreen for that to happen.”
What is remarkable about that vision is not that she had it, but that she had it so early in her career.
With husband and fellow producer Tom Ackerley earlier this year.Credit: Getty
Though she had been acting professionally since 2008 – her screen debut came in Neighbours, where she played Donna Freedman for 327 episodes (or 328 if you include her brief cameo in last year’s finale-that-wasn’t) – she was still virtually unheard of outside Australia until The Wolf of Wall Street led to Lucky Chap being born.
In June 2013, while she was shooting Suite Francaise, she sat at number 3839 on IMDb’s starmeter, which ranks the profile of Hollywood players by internet search prominence. By the time she was celebrating in London, just days after appearing on Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show and admitting to having lied to her parents about her nude scenes in Scorsese’s film, she sat at number two. The only person ahead of her at that moment was Jennifer Lawrence.
Robbie isn’t the first actress to see a path to career longevity via production – Reese Witherspoon has been a trailblazer in that respect, and others have followed – but she is unusual in having taken that step at such a young age. Now 33, she was just 24 when Lucky Chap was conceived.
Daina Reid, the Emmy-nominated director of The Handmaid’s Tale and the Sarah Snook feature Run Rabbit Run, remembers casting Robbie in one of her earliest roles, a guest part on City Homicide in 2008.
Robbie in 2009, with fellow Neighbours cast member Dean Geyer.Credit: Ben Rushton
“I don’t remember chatting about her productorial ambitions, but I remember no one was giving her a job because she was so pretty, which annoyed me, so I gave her a job,” says Reid.
“She was fantastic and committed,” Reid adds. “It doesn’t surprise me that she is at the helm now. If someone isn’t giving you a job, give it to yourself.”
In Robbie’s case, the mantra extends to other women in the industry.
“It’s a wonderful position to be in since my platform can also open some of those doors,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. Sometimes, her name attached to a project helps get it greenlit. But other times, she said, she opts to back a project even when she’s not right for the role.
Promising Young Woman – written and directed by Emerald Fennell (who played Camilla in seasons three and four of The Crown) and starring Carey Mulligan – was just such a project. And while Robbie did end up starring in Barbie, her ambition was always to subvert expectations.
“We like the things that feel a little left of centre,” Robbie said. “Something like Barbie where the IP, the name itself, people immediately have an idea of, ‘Oh, Margot is playing Barbie, I know what that is,’ but our goal is to be like, ‘Whatever you’re thinking, we’re going to give you something totally different – the thing you didn’t know you wanted’.
Robbie had a showstopping scene in The Big Short.
“Can we truly honour the IP and the fan base and also surprise people? Because if we can do all that and provoke a thoughtful conversation, then we’re really firing on all cylinders.”
Judging from its first week, Barbie is not just firing, it’s roaring. Some of the reviews have been mixed, but the embrace from audiences has been astonishing. And coupled with the enthusiasm for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the cultural moment that has been dubbed Barbenheimer has breathed fresh hope into the notion that the cinema business might have a future.
After just one week in Australian cinemas (as of Thursday), Barbie has clocked up $27.83 million, making it the fourth highest-grossing film of the year (The Super Mario Bros. Movie, out front with $51.71 million, could take some catching, though). Globally, it has taken $US408 million ($603 million).
“We have a pink unicorn here,” Jeff Goldstein, president of domestic distribution at Warner Bros, told Variety this week. “We thought it would be a $US75 million for the opening weekend. Nobody saw $US155 million coming. This doll has long legs.”
No matter where the film ends up on end-of-year tables – it currently sits at number 12 globally for the year, and should easily land inside the top five – it has established once and for all that Robbie and her Lucky Chap colleagues know what they are doing.
But amazingly, as recently as December, some had begun to wonder if the gloss hadn’t already begun to wear off the golden girl from the Goldie.
The box-office failure of Damian Chazelle’s Babylon, in which Robbie played actress Nellie LaRoy, was taken by some pundits as a sign that the gloss was wearing off the golden girl.Credit: Paramount
Following disappointing debuts for Damian Chazelle’s early-Hollywood romp Babylon and David O. Russell’s star-studded Amsterdam, various outlets declared 2022 “a year to forget” for Robbie, wondered if she had become “box office poison”, claimed she’d had “a constant streak of flops recently” and declared her “last five live-action movies flopped at the box office”.
In truth, as reported by this masthead at the time, most of Robbie’s on-screen work has come as part of an ensemble, so to lay the blame (or success) of any film solely at her feet was over the top. With an average box office gross of $US143.6 million per film across her career, it’s hard to find any metric that would support the claim she is not a bankable performer.
Off-screen, it’s much the same. The six films Lucky Chap has released to date (the Oscar-winning I, Tonya was the first) have collectively taken $US682 million, an average of just under $114 million. Exclude the two titles – Terminal and Dreamland – that mostly bypassed cinemas and the average rises to more than $US170 million. Barbie will push that figure higher still. They have also been nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning two.
Cynics might query whether Robbie is a genuine producer, or merely one of the many actors who collect the credit as a kind of vanity trinket. But the evidence points to the former.
While it’s impossible to know precisely what any credited producer has done on any given project from the outside, a sure indicator of hands-on involvement is the affixing of a “p.g.a.” designation beside their name.
The Producers Guild of America rules for eligibility for the credit state that a producer “must have performed, in a decision-making capacity, a major portion of the producing functions on the Motion Picture”, with the contribution weighted at different stages of a film’s development thus: development (the conceiving of a project, purchase of rights and securing of financing) 35 per cent; pre-production (selection of key members of the creative team, including writers, director, heads of department and key cast) 20 per cent; production (managing the actual making of the film) 20 per cent; post-production and marketing (the editing, score composition and marketing phase) 25 per cent.
On Barbie, Robbie and Ackerley have p.g.a. credits, along with Harry Potter producer David Heyman and Robbie Brenner (Dallas Buyers Club).
Robbie also has p.g.a. credits on Dreamland (2019) and Birds of Prey (2020), though not on Promising Young Woman. Despite her crucial role in backing the film, had it won the best picture Oscar for which it was nominated in 2021, it would have been McNamara alone who represented Lucky Chap on that stage.
Not to worry. Even if Barbie only rains gold rather than golden statuettes, it has already established that Robbie is not just a bona fide movie star – reportedly earning $US12.5 million for the title role – but also a producer to be reckoned with.
As producers, she and Ackerley will get a handsome cut of the Barbie profits on top of their fees. Just as importantly, the success of the film makes it that much easier for Lucky Chap to finance and make other projects, some big, some small, some mainstream, some offbeat.
Not all of their projects will see the light of day, of course, but some will. Three – an untitled Shakespeare TV series, an Ocean’s Eleven project, with Robbie set to star, and a second Barbie film – are already listed as in pre-production, meaning they have a very real chance of progressing. Two others (including a remake of the 1990s riot grrl film Tank Girl) are listed as “announced”, which is a fair indication of intent too.
With 29 titles in total listed as in development, Lucky Chap clearly mean business. And with Barbie putting the wind in their collective sails, it’s a fair bet Robbie and her colleagues will be Hollywood players for a long time to come.
Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.
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