This Was the Year That Greta Gerwig Saved Hollywood

As we wrap up our year-end coverage, IndieWire looks back at the people, projects, and ideas that defined 2023 — and what’s coming next.

To fully appreciate the financial success of Greta Gerwig’s zeitgeist-shifting smash hit “Barbie,” let’s briefly consider some of the other heavy-hitters it trounced at the box office: John Wick, Indiana Jones, Transformers, the “Fast and Furious” family, and The Flash. The number-one film of the year may have sprung from beloved (slight shudder here) intellectual property, but Gerwig (along with her personal and professional partner, co-writer Noah Baumbach) so wholly transformed the iconic doll, shaping a new mythos around her in the process, that nothing about “Barbie” felt been-there or done-that in the slightest.

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While Hollywood’s affection for — and attention to — the kind of franchise features that used to regularly top the box office charts is on the decline, the success of “Barbie,” the sort of fresh take on seemingly old material that should inspire and instruct an entire generation of filmmakers, offering a new roadmap for what can be a smash hit. Or, more bluntly: Gerwig and her “Barbie” saved Hollywood this year, and she did it by doing something that the big-screen bigwigs too often ignore, which is being original even within potentially tight parameters (a movie about a doll?).

Of course, box office bucks aren’t the only metric of cinematic success — frankly, they might be the least essential of said metrics, though they sure make Hollywood brass sit up and pay attention. The real impact of the film’s original bent will only be felt in the months and years to come, as other filmmakers attempt to make their own “Barbie” in an environment (hopefully) more open to the possibilities of such big swings. (Anecdotal evidence does hold that the cultural impact of “Barbie” is far from over: just last week, I was strolling through Central Park and saw a fellow fan wearing a “Barbie” sweatshirt, I yelled out, “HI, BARBIE!” and she answered back immediately.)

When Gerwig and Baumbach set out to write “Barbie,” an experience that was initially (and amusingly) marked by even Baumbach expressing his disbelief that this was something they could or would do, she was compelled by the relative freedom she knew was available to her and Baumbach. Mostly, as she told our Anne Thompson recently, they knew they could “go for broke,” and they did.

As Gerwig told me earlier this summer, just as “Barbie” was hitting theaters and making a very big splash indeed, she didn’t expect they’d get away with, well, pretty much anything in that script. “I think it was definitely something where, when turned in the script, which was the wild, anarchic thing that it is, there was this general feeling of, no one will let us make this. Not Warner Bros., not Mattel, not anybody,” she said.

And while she readily admitted “there were many notes, many notes sessions on all fronts” from the bigwigs, there’s nothing left in the final feature she doesn’t love. That may be the key to this entire crazy dream. As she explained, “Anything that I have in a movie, any reference — and we reference ‘The Godfather,’ Matchbox Twenty, Dave Matthews Band — I love all of it. I never put anything in a movie I don’t love, and that’s true. I don’t really have use for things that I don’t have affection for, within a movie. That was the core of it.”

More than the millions of dollars the film has pulled in, the already countless awards and honors Gerwig and her team have picked up, the sweatshirts that make people yell out in joy and recognition, that’s the core of it. Finding something you love and sticking with it. Hell, sticking it in a $135 million studio feature about a decades-old doll.

But Gerwig’s success hinges on more than just her own hard work, as her relentlessly creative and inventive production involved a slew of talented stars (Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, of course, but also a supporting cast that boasts nothing but gems, like America Ferrera, Issa Rae, Dua Lipa, Kate McKinnon, Alexandra Shipp, Michael Cera, Simu Liu, Hari Nef, Ritu Arya, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans, Emerald Fennell, Arianna Greenblatt, and narrator Helen Mirren), plus below the line standouts like cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, editor Nick Houy, production designer Sarah Greenwood, and costume designer Jacqueline Durran (many of them holdovers from her “Little Women” and “Lady Bird”).

This is, after all, a filmmaker so invested in the concept of a shared vision and honoring those who inspire her that she wouldn’t even cut a cameo appearance by the legendary costume designer Ann Roth in her final version of “Barbie.” Gerwig’s vision only works because she’s able to align with similarly invested and talented people, both above and below the line, a lesson Hollywood brass should absolutely take away from the success of Gerwig’s film. It’s all about the people who make the film, the product, the content, the whatever, nothing else can replace that. It’s about creativity and freedom and finding joy in all sorts of spaces. It’s about having something to say, and saying it with style.

As Gerwig said at our recent IndieWire Honors ceremony, where she accepted the Auteur Award, “I truly really would have never directed if it weren’t for journalists, and especially journalists at IndieWire, who saw me as someone who had something to say before I really knew I had something to say at all.”

This year, we were hardly the only ones listening to what Gerwig had to say. Everyone was, too. How fantastic to live in Gerwig’s very own Barbie World.

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