Ynon Kreiz has an unusual claim for a CEO: Being played by Will Ferrell in a smash hit movie. Not literally: Ferrell appears as an unnamed, besuited and rather hapless boss of Mattel in Barbie, the Margot Robbie-starring hit that wowed audiences around the world last year.
Kreiz is the toy company’s real boss and — meta alert — also produced the film, having signed up Robbie as its star and fellow producer shortly after he was appointed chief executive in 2018. Such is the circular nature of Hollywood, which, beginning with Star Wars, used to churn out movies that became toys. Barbie is a Mattel toy that became a movie, which, you might think, was conceived in order to sell more dolls.
Not so, says Kreiz, who was hired to transform Mattel and move it beyond its core toy business. The Barbie film, made by Warner Brothers, “was not about selling more toys”, he says. Instead, the aim was “to break convention and do something wholly original to create a cultural event”. The team he assembled at the company was given a mandate “to make quality content that people want to watch. If we do that well, good things will happen.”
Even before any additional sales of Barbies are taken into account, the film’s box office success — it grossed US$1.45 billion (S$1.91 billion) — flowed straight to Mattel’s bottom line, with the movie responsible for US$90 million of company operating profit from an additional US$150 million of revenue.
Barbie’s critical reception (it garnered several Oscar nominations this year, winning for best original song) and the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, when people saw Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s infinitely more serious Oppenheimer on the same cinema visit, means the film surely achieved Kreiz’s “cultural event” aim. It breathed life back into Hollywood after a long and painful pandemic-induced slump.
Before Kreiz landed at Mattel, most of his career had been in television, although his life could have gone in a different direction.
After his Israeli military service he spent two years travelling in the Caribbean, where he worked as a windsurfing instructor. “I was following the wind wherever it was blowing,” he previously told the Financial Times.
