For years, Hasbro’s approach to turning a toy into a movie was to make it dumb and have a lot of explosions. It worked with the Transformers movies (at least in terms of making money), but it was less effective in the Battleship and G.I. Joe movies. Mattel, which has yet to really launch as many movies based on toys as Hasbro has, is taking a different tactic for its fledgling movie branch: It’s giving toy brands over to famous people in hopes that they’ll make something that actually good instead of just “has explosions.” Rapper Lil Yachty is making some kind of UNO heist movie, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach are apparently working on a Barbie movie that we will believe when we see, and a few months ago we learned that Vin Diesel was attached to a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots movie.
Today, Mattel attached two famous people to a toy movie that is somehow even weirder than those three, with Lena Dunham writing and directing a Polly Pocket movie that will star Lily Collins as the title character. The original toy line involved a very small plastic girl who lived in a clamshell playset. Basically, it was like having a Barbie house that you could take on a car ride, which doesn’t seem like it should lend itself directly to a movie, but we’ve seen enough of these toy movies to know that’s not true. In fact, Dunham’s plan sounds pretty straightforward (via Deadline), with her movie about about “a young girl and a pocket-sized woman who form a friendship.” So it’s like if the Transformers movies were about a guy who has a toy car that turns into a robot, except the robot is alive—just a straight line from “what the toy is” to “what the movie is.” Dunham also teases that the movie will be “smart” and “playful” without “condescension,” so she definitely has some kind of take on the property.
