Judd Apatow says no one puts “Barbie” in the adapted screenplay corner.
Last week, Variety reported that Greta Gerwig’s megahit “Barbie” had been classified as an adapted screenplay by the executive committee of the writers’ branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The film had been campaigning for an original screenplay in the Oscar race.
“It’s an insult to the writers to say they worked from existing material,” said the “Superbad” director. wrote in X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday. “There was no material or story. There was a clear box.”
Before “Barbie” hit theaters (and skyrocketed at the box office) in July, the Writers Guild of America labeled the script as original, and it will remain in that category for the upcoming WGA Awards.
The writing branch has taken its position even though “Barbie” is not an adaptation of a book, play, video game, nor does it work with characters from a previous film. Maybe it’s because Barbie has been around as a doll since Mattel released her in 1959.
However, 2014’s “The Lego Movie” also released a movie based on a toy, and the academy classified its script as original.
The Times’ Glenn Whipp responded that the academy’s decision could be because “Barbie” uses general character traits associated with the characters, while “The Lego Movie” didn’t have that problem, because Legos aren’t really characters: They are interlocking plastic bricks. .
Previous Oscar-nominated films based on pre-existing characters, including “Toy Story 3” and “Borat 2,” were also classified as adapted screenplays.
The Oscar nominees will be announced on January 23. If Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s “Barbie” had been recognized as an original screenplay, it likely would have competed with “Past Lives” and “The Holdovers,” each nominated for multiple Golden Globes. Now “Barbie” faces strong contenders such as “Killers of the Flower Moon”, “Poor Things” and his best box office hit, “Oppenheimer”.
Times columnist Glenn Whipp contributed to this report.
