Margot Robbie Pitched Barbie By Using Jurassic Park As A Reference

It’s safe to say that Margot Robbie’s Barbie is a film unlike any other — but she still had to use the success of other films to get executives on board. In a July 19 interview with Collider, the star and producer revealed that she compared the Greta Gerwig-directed Barbie to none other than Steven Spielberg’s ’90s classic Jurassic Park to get the film made, because nothing is more alike than Barbie and dinosaurs.

When Robbie picked up the rights to adapt Mattel’s Barbie empire into a live-action film, she first had to sell Gerwig as the ideal writer-director and convince both the company and studio execs to trust their creative vision. “I think my pitch in the greenlight meeting was the studios have prospered so much when they’re brave enough to pair a big idea with a visionary director,” she said. “And then I gave a series of examples like, ‘dinosaurs and Spielberg,’ that and that — pretty much naming anything that’s been incredible and made a ton of money for the studios over the years. And I was like, ‘Now you've got Barbie and Greta Gerwig.’”

The actor went on to praise Jurassic Park, which starred Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill, and Laura Dern and speculated how that idea was first received. “Can you imagine that first meeting? They’re like, ‘Dinosaurs? I don’t know, I mean, yeah? That might turn out kind of silly,’” she said. “And then here we are decades later being like, ‘That’s the greatest movie ever.’”

Perhaps the comparison wasn’t too far off considering that Barbie was once a dinosaur expert (as well as many other jobs). As reported by Time, Barbie made forays into paleontology with dolls that were released in 1997 and 2012 as part of the Career Collection. As everyone knows, Barbie is everything.

Elsewhere in the interview, Robbie also admitted to giving a very overestimated prediction of how much money Barbie would make at the box office. “I think I told them that it’d make a billion dollars, which maybe I was overselling, but we had a movie to make, okay?” she quipped. In her defense, Jurassic Park did end up grossing over $1 billion in the long run, but it looks like Barbie will still be off to a strong start. According to Forbes, Barbie is projected to gross as much as $110 million, with some estimates reaching $140 million in its first weekend, making it an early winner against Oppenheimer in the Barbenheimer battle.