Barbie was a smash hit at the cinemas, but could every doll become that? Mattel was working on a Polly Pocket film with Lena Dunham, but the filmmaker says she’s moving away from it now.
During a recent interview with The New Yorker, Dunham confirms her split from the project. The Girls creator was attached to write and direct with Lily Collins set to star.
“I’m not going to make the Polly Pocket movie,” Dunham announced. “I wrote a script, and I was working on it for three years. But I remember someone once said to me about Nancy Meyers: the thing that’s the most amazing about her is that the movie she makes or the movie she would be making with or without a studio, with or without notes — that somehow her taste manages to intersect perfectly with what the world wants. What a fucking gift that is. And Nora Ephron, too, who was such a mentor to me but always said, ‘Go be weird. Don’t kowtow to anyone.'”
“I think Greta Gerwig managed this incredible feat [with Barbie], which was to make this thing that was literally candy to so many different kinds of people and was perfectly and divinely Greta,” Dunham continued. “And I just — I felt like, unless I can do it that way, I’m not going to do it. I don’t think I have that in me. I feel like the next movie I make needs to feel like a movie that I absolutely have to make. No one but me could make it. And I did think other people could make Polly Pocket.”
Polly Pocket is one of many projects Mattel hopes to turn into a massive IP; Barney and Hot Wheels are also in development among a host of other projects.
Dunham is currently in post-production on her upcoming Netflix series Too Much, an autobiographical rom-com starring Megan Stalter; that series is expected to premiere in 2025. There are also reports that the filmmaker is working with Netflix on a spy series.
