This summer, “Barbie” has revived the box office, making nearly $500 million worldwide in its first week. Earlier this year, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” surpassed the billion-dollar mark. If those two success are any indication, it seems that nostalgia sells — particularly nostalgia for classic toys and characters to which moviegoers have a personal connection.
“The Beanie Bubble” (streaming Friday on Apple TV+) centers around the Beanie Baby craze of the ’90s. But the movie is not really about Beanie Babies.
Based on the book “The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute” by author Zac Bissonnette, the film is the feature directorial debut for co-directors and real-life married couple, musician Damian Kulash and Kristin Gore, who wrote the screenplay. The movie is set against the backdrop of the rise in popularity of Beanie Babies in the 1990’s. But what the filmmakers are aiming to tell is a much deeper, human story about the American dream, capitalism, democracy, power, cracks in the system and sexism in business.
“I didn’t think that I cared about the Beanie Baby craze,” Gore tells Variety. But when she read the book, she says was immediately captivated. “We both realized that within this incredibly wild story, it was full of really compelling people.”
She continues, “There was this insane tale about one of the most absurd crazes in American history involving tiny beanbag animals that were $5 and became treated like gold — and that’s already so bizarre and weird — but really, what spoke to us in the book were these three women’s journeys that were so instrumental to the phenomenon. That is what hooked us on wanting to tell the movie and making their journeys.”
“The Beanie Bubble” stars Zach Galifianakis as Beanie Baby founder Ty Warner, who became a billionaire as the inventor of the tiny stuffed animals. Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook and Geraldine Viswanathan star as the three women who helped Warner create Beanie Babies, but were never given any credit.
Banks, Snook and Viswanathan play characters based on the real women who helped Warner create a toy empire. The women they portray in the film are composites of the real-life people, but the directors took some liberties with adding in creative, fictionalized elements. “In their stories, we found fascinating underdog stories that helped us explore why we value what we value in our culture and what the female relationship to the American dream really is,” Gore says.
The filmmaking duo never met any of the real people portrayed in the movie, solely using the book as their source material. They did not reach out to Warner, but utilized him, symbolically, as a “stand-in for the American dream,” Gore describes.
“And the fact that the American dream does reward narcissists,” Kulash chimes in. “Especially narcissist men who take credit for things.”
Gore says that in the book, Warner is portrayed as charismatic. “He’s warm and generous and interesting and Willy Wonka-ish, but also capable of great selfishness and cruelty,” she says. “He’s basically just an opportunist who’s given the opportunities that the women aren’t, and he’s able to take the fruits of their labor and continue his path forward.”
In 2014, Warner pleaded guilty to tax evasion. At the end of the film, viewers learn how the women’s lives all ended up with happy endings.
“It was really important to us that the feeling at the end of the movie is that you’re pissed off about the system, but you feel a sense of victory,” Kulash says. “Do you really want to be the person who wins the billions of dollars, if all it does is leave you alone in your ivory tower, while the people you screwed over are off having good lives?”
“It feels pretty universal to be pissed off right now,” Kulash adds. “There are few parts of society now that don’t feel fucked. Whether or not you’re on the left or the right, you’re pissed off right now. I think the ’90s is about as far back as people can look and go, ‘It wasn’t like this then.’ But part of our story is like, ‘Well, it was sort of always like this.’”
Recently, there has been a recent trend in movies that center around products: from Eva Longoria’s “Flamin’ Hot,” which tells the story behind the founder of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos; to Ben Affleck’s “Air” about the rise of Nike; to “BlackBerry,” the biographical dramedy that chronicled the rise and fall of the first smartphone.
At their core, all of these movies are actually about the people behind the products — whether it’s a cautionary tale, or an upbeat underdog story. Still, for “The Beanie Bubble,” the filmmakers say the product trend and nostalgia factor were not intentional.
“We can’t ignore that there is a big pattern there, but we so did not mean to be part of it,” Kulash says. Theorizing about the recent trend in movies, he says, “Corporations have more power than governments do at this point. And, in the same way that we grew up on Cold War films, I’m not that surprised that we now have the same ‘us and them’ mentality, but based on corporations.”
Kulash notes that he and his wife were not interested in telling a story about a product or about a “man getting richer,” but rather about the “universal tale” that happens over and over again in American society where “people find the allure and promise in a dream, buy into it and end up being spat out.”
Gore says she finds it “super depressing” that there are so many movies being made today about products. “I think it’s a real testament to the consumerist excess of late stage capitalism. Everyone is just looking for human stories — it’s just sort of depressing that it falls around products. It feels like if everyone could channel that passion into stories, we could make humanity into a little bit healthier of a place.”
With a laugh, she quips, “But we’re total hypocrites, I realize, because we made a movie about Beanie Babies.”
The big takeaway, she hopes, is audiences feel “some sense of empowerment that we can create a better system.”
