Life really does imitate art. If you somehow don’t have the plot of Greta Gerwig’s summer smash hit Barbie already committed to memory, here’s a little refresher: after Ryan Gosling’s himbo-esque Ken discovers the wonders of patriarchy in the real world, he and his fellow Kens stage a coup to take over Barbie Land and infuse it with more horses, viewings of the Snyder Cut, and general masculinity.
While Ryan Gosling delivers a performance for the ages (and the Billboard charts for that matter), one prevailing complaint about Barbie was that it simply had too much Ken for a movie supposedly about Barbie and her own journey. Unfortunately for that camp of fans, Barbie Land might suffer from even more Ken-ergy in the future.
In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, Gerwig and her partner and co-writer Noah Baumbach were talking about how much extra material they had written for Ken when Baumbach seemed to slip up a little. “Don’t give it away because we might do…” he says, before stuttering out an attempt at a course correction: “Yeah, but there was a whole… just more about the Ken effect in the real world.”
When the interviewer follows up by asking if there would ever be a Ken movie, the writers laugh and say they can’t comment. “The truth is, I guess we’ll see,” Gerwig continues, with a look to her partner by her side.
Even if this wasn’t actually a slip-up on Baumbach’s part, Gerwig’s answer is far more vague than it was the last time she was asked about a potential Barbie sequel. “I feel like that at the end of every movie, like I’ll never have another idea, and everything I’ve ever wanted to do, I did,” Gerwig told the New York Times back in July. “I wouldn’t want to squash anybody else’s dream, but for me, at this moment, I’m at totally zero.”
You can see if you think Gerwig and Baumbach are alluding to a spin-off below. In the meantime, we’re still patiently waiting for Gerwig to #ReleaseTheAllanCut.
