Adaptation Barbie: Why Margot Robbie’s film isn’t classed as ‘original’

Barbie, last year’s highest-grossing film, is now an awards season favourite. On Sunday, it picked up the first-ever Golden Globe for cinematic and box-office achievement.

A slew of Academy Award nominations are expected, including for the film’s screenplay by director Greta Gerwig and her husband Noah Baumbach.

Ryan Gosling, left, and Margot Robbie in a scene from Barbie.Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures/AP

But a decision by the Oscars organisers, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, that Barbie compete in the adapted rather than original screenplay category has provoked criticism.

Leading Hollywood screenwriter Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) tweeted: “It’s insulting to the writers to say they were working off of existing material. There was no clear existing material or story.”

The Writers Guild of America has classified Barbie as an original work for their upcoming awards.

Such discord is not unusual; 2017’s eventual best picture winner Moonlight was based on an unproduced play prompting the guild to consider the film original, while the Oscars shortlisted the film for the Best Adapted Screenplay award, which it won.

Few would argue 1939 film Gone With the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell’s book, was an adaptation.Credit: Getty

This latest decision has prompted discussion about what should be considered an adaptation. Few would argue that films based on books, plays and stage musicals like Gone with the Wind, A Streetcar Named Desire and West Side Story are adaptations.

But in an era in which diversified conglomerates like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery own Hollywood studios, an increasing number of films are based on franchise-ready intellectual property like comic books, video games and theme park attractions.

The success of Barbie has already seen more toy-based films move into production, with a Lily Collins-starring Polly Pocket movie expected next year. But should these films be treated as adaptations?

For the Academy Awards, the answer is yes. The Oscars consider films based on any pre-existing material such as sequels (Top Gun: Maverick), remakes (CODA), and movies with characters who’ve appeared in other media like TV’s Borat to be adaptations. Audiences and the industry do not always agree.

Apatow argues in his tweet that with Barbie “there was no existing material or story”, and therefore the film can’t be an adaptation. While the Barbie filmmakers are rightly being celebrated for turning a potential toy advert into a self-aware satire, much of the humour in Barbie is derived from playing with 60 years of pink plastic.

These references to the toyline’s history range from the iconic (Barbie’s Dreamhouse) to the obscure (Barbie’s pregnant friend Midge).

Would the film’s jokes and commentary have been as incisive had the screenplay not been based on the world’s most famous fashion doll? Implicit in Apatow’s comments are ingrained biases against adaptations, which are often dismissed as derivative when compared to “original” work.

Some argue that adaptation is easier because there is already a story, but one need only look at the mixed results adapting seemingly unfilmable works like Watchmen, Cloud Atlas and Cats to see how a recognisable source material can be more restrictive than helpful.

Despite these difficulties, audiences and critics still greet the news that a best-selling book, popular comic or beloved board game is about to be turned into a film franchise with the tired refrain “Hollywood has run out of ideas!” But the truth is: Hollywood never had any ideas.

When cinema first flickered to life film pioneers used existing stories to confer artistic credibility and narrative stability on the fledging form. Before dedicated movie palaces like Nickelodeons, moving pictures were first shown in music halls, vaudeville theatres and other venues of ill-repute.

To gain middle-class credibility for cinema, early filmmakers adapted respectable literature from the likes of Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare.

During these pioneer days, filmmakers didn’t worry about simple things like copyright, but as cinema moved from a sideshow novelty to a lucrative business, publishers and authors began to assert their rights.

Frozen, a 2013 adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, was box office gold for Disney.

A 1907 adaptation of Lew Wallace’s book Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ marked the first time in which filmmakers were successfully taken to court for not securing the rights to a source material.

Since those early days adaptation has been the backbone of cinema. The filmographies of Golden Age directors like John Ford, John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock are almost exclusively adaptations – even if Hitchcock did buy up all available copies of Robert Bloch’s Psycho to preserve the twist ending.

From Snow White in 1937 to reworking Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen as Frozen, the Disney canon is equally dependent on adaptation. Even film movements like the French New Wave and British Social Realism, challenged staid literary adaptations through more lively screen versions of contemporary, often low-brow, literature.

Adaptation by Numbers

• 64 of the 95 best picture Oscar winners are adaptations.
• 8 of the 10 highest-grossing films of all time are adaptations.
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula holds the Guinness World Record for “most adapted literary character”.
• Georges Méliès 6-minute Cinderella released in 1899 is often considered the first film adaptation.
• 50 of the 62 Disney classics are adaptations.
• At 89, screenwriter James Ivory is the oldest winner of the best-adapted screenplay Oscar for Call Me By Your Name.
• Emma Thompson, who won the best adapted screenplay Oscar for Sense and Sensibility, is the only winner who has also won for acting.

There are many examples of where film adaptations have added qualities unavailable to the source author, arguably surpassing the original. MGM turned L. Frank Baum’s children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into a timeless musical, Peter Weir’s veiled camera brought an ethereal quality to Picnic at Hanging Rock that was not in Joan Lindsay’s original text, while Christopher Nolan found war on terror resonances in Batman adaptation The Dark Knight.

So, Barbie can wear her screenplay’s origins proudly this awards season because adaptation never goes out of style.

Associate Professor Liam Burke is the Cinema & Screen Studies Coordinator at Swinburne University of Technology.

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