Credit: PBSMattel Films is ready to hit the world by storm with adaptions of its enormous backstock of recognizable IP, beginning with the candy-colored world of Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Logically, the company will follow that up by starring iconic purple children’s entertainer Barney the Dinosaur in what sounds like a grueling, psychologically intense arthouse horror movie.
According to Mattel Films executive producer Kevin McKeon (per The New Yorker), the upcoming Daniel Kaluuya Barney feature film will be “surrealistic” and have more in common with the psychologically intense work of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, like the Nicolas Cage thriller Adaptation (2002) and Being John Malkovich (1999) than the beloved 1990s-2000s children show.
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Kevin McKeon even goes on to say that Barney would be “really a play for adults. Not that it’s R-rated, but it’ll focus on some of the trials and tribulations of being 30-something, growing up with Barney—just the level of disenchantment within the generation” and similar to an A24 film, the distribution and production company known for disturbing arthouse horror like Midsommar (2019) and Hereditary (2018).
So, it seems like Mattel Films really has an interest in making a Daniel Kaluuya film that is more like his recent work in the Jordan Peele alien horror film Nope (2022) than anything that would involve a cheery singalong. An odd direction for the studio to go into, but presumably, it has a plan for the future.
The start of the plan is, of course, Barbie, which will star Margot Robbie as the title character (as well as Dua Lipa, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Mackey, and many others as the title character), Ryan Gosling as a version of Ken, and will be directed by Greta Gerwig before she jumps ship to helm multiple Narnia adaptations for Netflix.
Related: Universal Permanently Cancels Barney Stage Show
It is telling, however, that the Barbie movie (while marketed as being a fun family adventure movie) likely is a more psychologically complex movie in which Margot Robbie has an existential crisis upon entering the “real” world and realizing she is a mass-manufactured toy.
It seems likely that Barney will try to mine the same kind of self-aware conflicts involved in trying to draw millennials and Gen Xers to the theaters to watch a movie about things they loved as children. It is currently unclear whether Daniel Kaluuya will be playing Barney himself, one of Barney’s gang of children, who are presumably now fully grown, or just someone horrified by the shocking reality of a dancing and singing purple dinosaur. We’ll just have to see.