Sharon Stone revealed that she tried to get a Barbie movie made in the 1990s… but was met with laughter, Variety reported.
Quite a reaction for someone who has been generous to not just one but two of her co-stars. However, two decades makes a lot of difference, as Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie's Barbie premiered in 2023 and has earned $1.4 billion worldwide. It was last year's biggest film and made history at Warner Bros. as its biggest earner.
Sharon Stone: Big Barbie fan
Stone posted a comment to America Ferrera's Instagram, where the Barbie star shared the powerful speech she gave accepting the SeeHer Award at the Critics Choice Award. The Academy Award-nominee began, “I was laughed out [of] the studio when I came [with] the Barbie idea in the '90s [with] the support of the head of Barbie.”
“How far we've come. Thank you ladies for your courage and endurance,” she continued.
Ferrera's speech paid tribute to the Barbie director “for proving through your incredible mastery as a filmmaker that women's stories have no difficulty achieving cinematic greatness and box-office history at the same time, and that unabashedly telling female stories does not diminish your powers, it expands them.”
Would've Been Barbies
Stone isn't the only actor who has and tried and failed to make a movie about the iconic doll. Before Gerwig and Robbie came along, Amy Schumer and Anne Hathaway both sought to make a Barbie film at Sony pictures. Schumer was originally set to be Barbie, but she told Variety last year that her version wasn't “feminist and cool enough” which might be the “creative differences” that caused her to bow out.
Hathaway then replaced Schumer, this time Barbie was supposed to get kicked out of Barbieland for not being perfect — perfect enough, that is. Alethea Jones was in talk to direct the film, which sources said was a mix of Splash, Enchanted (which Hathaway starred in) and Big. The pitch went nowhere, but the Oscar winner is okay with that.
She told Josh Horowitz when she recently appeared on his Happy Sad Confused podcast, “The bullseye caused the entire world to reach this level of ecstasy. Now imagine that version … that much energy, that much anticipation, that much emotion … but it's not the right version. I actually think of it as a lucky thing [it didn’t get made].”
Hathaway added, “Margot is sublime.”
“The mythic giants they toppled with [Barbie] that have kept certain narratives in place that have not allowed opportunities to develop for so many people … they ran straight through it! Just as a cinemagoer and as a woman in Hollywood since I was a kid, I'm thrilled by the development. If I believed that the version I was attached to could have done that, I might feel differently about it, but I genuinely think their film was the best possible version,” she continued.
Barbie has racked up quite a few wins this awards season. At the recent Critics Choice Awards, it received six trophies: Best Comedy, Best Original Screenplay (Gerwig and Noah Baumbach), Best Song (I'm Just Ken), Best Costume Design, Best Production Design and Best Hair and Makeup.
Before that, the film received two awards at the Golden Globes: Best Original Song (What Was I Made For?) and the inaugural Cinematic and Box Office Achievement Award.
Barbie is expected to receive a few Academy Award nominations next week, including best picture, and my fearless forecast: Best Song for What Was I Made For?.
To paraphrase what Sharon Stone said, “We've come a long way, Barbie.”
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