"I had just read a trend report predicting that the year would be marked by what it called "franchise fatigue," the collective exhaustion brought on by the "constant and inevitable churn" of spin-offs and reboots. The movies and TV shows of the past decade had been dominated by sequels, remakes, and familiar storylines repackaged from video games, bestsellers, and tweets."
"And yet, in the midst of all this, Hollywood was reviving another familiar media property: Former indie darling Greta Gerwig was directing a Barbie movie-one that I would eventually review for this magazine. The film wouldn't come out for several months, but it had already bucked any trend toward fatigue. The trailer alone had started a craze. It depicted Barbie as not merely a"
The original Barbie doll did not originate at Mattel but at a business that had perfected plaster casts of Adolf Hitler. A trip to Berlin on March 4, 2023 is recounted, with lodging in a fourth-floor walkup shared with a former DJ turned seasonal arepa vendor; the apartment lay between a street named for Karl Marx and one named for the discoverer of an inflammatory disorder that can cause rectal bleeding. A trend report labeled the moment "franchise fatigue" as sequels, remakes, and adaptations dominated film and television schedules. Despite that saturation, Greta Gerwig's upcoming Barbie film and its viral trailer generated renewed cultural excitement.
Read at The Nation
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