Lena Dunham is pulling out of the toy adaptation business post-“Barbie.”
The “Girls” creator was previously tapped to write and direct “Polly Pocket” based on the Mattel dolls; Lily Collins was rumored to star. However, Dunham confirmed to The New Yorker that the project is no longer moving forward.
“I’m going to tell you something here that I haven’t told anyone: I’m not going to make the Polly Pocket movie,” Dunham said. “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.’ And 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. 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.”
She added, “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.’”
Mattel Films has at least 14 movies in development based on Mattel toys and other properties, ranging from Hot Wheels to American Girl dolls and the Magic 8 Ball imagined as a horror film. A “Barbie” sequel is also rumored at Warner Bros.
Instead of joining the Mattel Films family, Dunham is focusing on her TV projects like upcoming Netflix rom-com series “Too Much” and a college-centric spy series.
“There is a spy show that I’m creating for Netflix. It’s based on the idea that organizations like the C.I.A. and M.I.6 are tapping college students in, earlier and earlier. So it’s, basically, what happens when a group of college kids, who have all the issues, pains, and fears of college kids, are tasked with an agenda of national protection?” Dunham said.
She also is looking to balance her creative vision with more “commercial” elements, especially when it comes to features…just not “Polly Pocket.”
“I think the thing I would really like to tackle next is trying to make a film that’s distinctly commercial but also maintains the DNA of what is interesting to me,” Dunham said. “I think it’s another romantic comedy. Right now, I’m so full of, as my grandmother would say, piss and vinegar that I really want to focus. I also have a few TV projects going that are more commercial.”
The Emmy winner concluded, “My New Year’s resolution this year was, like, ‘I’m going to try to think more commercially thirty-seven per cent of the time, just because it’s an interesting challenge.’
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