Building Barbie Media: A Model for Doll-Based Media Franchises

Following the smashing box office success of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the trade and popular press was abuzz with discussion of the “doll film” and the possibility of a Mattel-toy-based “cinematic universe.” While film’s success is unquestionably notable, the majority of the discourse surrounding its industrial position is ahistoric. It ignores the extent to which Barbie has been at the center of both “doll films” and a transmedia media franchise for the entirety of the twenty-first century. There is a longstanding close relationship between toy brands and children’s brands, with Mattel-toy-based television series tracing back to the 1960s; but the media created around the Barbie brand beginning in the 1980s represented something new. It was not a toy-based show or film, but a regular and highly adaptive transmedia franchise, reworked by Mattel again and again as both home entertainment options and audience norms changed. Simultaneously, the Barbie brand evolved into a kind of template for doll-based entertainment. In this chapter, I draw on a combination of textual analysis and trade press analysis based on Jonathan Caldwell’s work, arguing that Mattel’s use of media to extend and promote the Barbie brand created a model that ultimately came to define the now-extensive array of media based on doll brands. Exemplified by Mattel’s launch of new doll lines like Monster High (with sixteen movies spanning 2010 to 2022) and Enchantimals (with four TV specials spanning 2017–2021, plus substantive web series episodes) as multimedia brands from conception, Barbie’s transmedia marketing template has also influenced doll brand competitors produced in the twenty-first century, like MGA’s Rainbow High (2020-present) and Project MC2 (2015–2017), as this chapter explains.