Like any millennial woman who grew up chewing on plastic Polly Pocket clothes (It’s a thing!), I was excited when I first heard, back in 2021, that the teeny, tiny doll would center a huge Hollywood movie starring Lily Collins, and helmed by none other than Girls creator Lena Dunham.
Yet when I read yesterday that Dunham had dropped out of writing and directing Mattel’s Polly Pocket movie, I felt a strange sense of…relief?
“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 told New Yorker writer Rachel Syme by way of explanation. “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.”
I saw Barbie three times in theaters (wearing pink each time), so I’m the last person to jump on the anti-toy-movie bandwagon, but there’s something deeply refreshing about seeing Dunham step away from this particular project. Hasn’t it been exhausting, watching the powers that govern Hollywood follow up any one hit with a slew of pale imitations? I mean, do we really need Barney and Hot Wheels movies to try to recapture the magic of Barbenheimer? (Or, for that matter, a sequel to every aughts movie ever made?)
I genuinely think that Dunham could have made a Polly Pocket movie that I would have enjoyed watching, but I admire her for knowing when to step back and focus on creating original art, instead of just churning out more Mattel IP that can’t possibly stand up to the pre-press-tour magic of Barbie. Growth—it comes for us all, in the end!