What on earth possessed a whole bunch of us to think pink on Monday night? True, many of us were in a playful mood, me included, because Warner Bros Discovery was hosting a series of multimedia screenings of Barbie across several screens at two multiplexes in central London.
It’s following hot on the turbo-charged heels of Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.
Nice people from WB’s UK top brass and corporate comms presided over a pre-screening soiree at the W Hotel. From an upper-floor window, the line of people waiting to gain entry to Cineworld’s Empire could be spied snaking its way across Leicester Square like a slither of pythons bedecked with candy floss.
The London screening of ‘Barbie’
Baz Bamigboye/Deadline
Dresses, jackets, trousers, T-shirts, the odd fascinator, fingernails (and yes, toenails too) flashed shades of cerise, fuchsia, magenta and raspberry.
If you must know, I had dug out an ancient Armani shirt that hadn’t been on my back for at least a decade. It was still wrapped in cellophane and cardboard from when it had last passed through a hotel laundry.
You get that’s it’s not my regular color of choice?
There was nothing in the WB invitation that stated I must blush in pink. [I do blush on occasion.]
I never turn out in Marvel costumes when attending an MCU movie, though I did for a moment consider renting a battered fedora for the world premiere in Cannes of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
OK, I do wear a tux to James Bond movie world premieres. Always have.
Why the pink shirt though. What’s that about?
My wife had something to do with it. We bet each other to pop on some pink for Barbie. Mrs. B’s silk striped blouse had a hint of peach and coral.
We enjoyed laughing at ourselves. Clearly, others felt the same. There were a lot of whoops and applause at our screening.
Neither one of us have ever possessed a Barbie doll, yet we’d been suckered in by WBs phenomenal marketing campaign for a movie inspired by Mattel’s billion-dollar polyvinyl doll.
I did want to see the film though. Keen as mustard to see what Greta Gerwig as director and co-writer with Noah Baumbach would make out of this pink fairytale floss.
Margot Robbie was third on my list for wanting to see it.
Got me thinking about something Quentin Tarantino told me during a long conversation we had in Cannes.
We’d gotten onto the subject of movie stars.
Tarantino said that we still have some. ”Sometimes movie stars make themselves, but usually the studios invested in an actor. They gave them a few chances because they saw something in them. And sometimes it didn’t pan out, right?
“But there was an investment,” he told me that day.
Now, not so much. “I don’t think that there’s just a giant investment in different actors to have them be movie stars. And once they become movie stars, ”Oh, okay, now we can use them for the next 10,15 years to help sell our products. I think there’s an investment in popular leading men and women, but they’re popular.
“They themselves are not going to bring an audience to go see a movie,” he argued.
As noted, this conversation took place in May, when our main topic involved Tarantino’s appearance in Cannes to announce a special screening of John Flynn’s 1977 movie Rolling Thunder in Directors’ Fortnight.
There’s a chapter about Flynn in Tarantino’s splendid Cinema Speculation book.
There wasn’t time then to include this segment of our chat in my columns from Cannes.
And, of course, Barbie wasn’t uppermost on our minds then.
But Tarantino’s point sticks.
The point of Robbie as Barbie is to help sell ”products.”
That’s not to diminish Robbie’s star power.
Good on her for whipping up a gazillion frothy news spreads and features after sashaying on pink carpets in Los Angeles, Sydney, Toronto, Seoul, Mexico City and London. Undoubtedly, Robbie did yeoman’s work for Barbie.
Margot Robbie
Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images for Warner Bros
All of those appearances were underpinned by a toy doll in her seventh decade.
Barbzilla has conquered.
RELATED: ‘Barbie’ & ‘Oppenheimer’ To Rattle The Globe With Combined $260M+ Opening – Box Office Preview
Robbie has won her movie-star stripes as far as Tarantino, who directed her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is concerned. “I think Margot has become a movie star,” he declared.
“I think Bradley Cooper has become a movie star,” he continued.
“Julia Roberts will always be a movie star,” he said with a gleam in his eye.
Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are movie stars, Tarantino asserted.
He nodded affirmatively as I reeled off Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington and Harrison Ford.
“Well, I’m not saying that the guys who are movie stars aren’t movie stars,” he stressed.
What about George Clooney, I ask?
“Well, it’s been a long while since I think George Clooney has drawn anybody to an audience,” he responded somewhat unkindly.
“When was the last time that he had a hit in this millennial?” he protested.
I expressed a yelp of surprise. ”Well, I’m asking you, when was his last hit where he drew an audience?” he demanded.
Ticket to Paradise, I blurted wanly, but before I could babble Gravity, Tarantino had folded his arms.
We were on the clock. No time to really get into greatest all-time movie stars, though Barbara Stanwyck warranted a quick mention.
“I’m not making a blanket statement,” he cautioned.
Deliberately, this column has decided to bury the lead.
There’s a contemporary actor that Tarantino rates above all others.
“Charlize Theron still alone,” he intoned.
“Not only is she a movie star, she’s probably the best action star that we have,” he said admiringly.
“Far more than the boys,” the director insisted.
The titles Mad Max: Fury Road, Atomic Blonde and The Old Guard quickly come to mind.
Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa in ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’
Warner Bros./Everett Collection
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, just her action movies,” he agreed.
“She’s always giving the best performance in action movies, whether it’s Fury Road or that one where everyone dies and gets up again. Oh yeah, the one you said: The Old Guard. Or Atomic Blonde. She carries those movies.
“She’s a presence. You like them. You buy that she can do the things that she does,” he said of Theron as he’s being pulled away from our table by personal publicist Katherine Rowe, eager to get him suited and booted for the Directors’ Fortnight event.
Theron sure did carry those movies.
Meanwhile, Barbie’s being carried by a child’s toy.
Not for the first time. Nor the last.
We’re in the age of the industrial toy complex.