Mattel CEO: Barbie film was about breaking convention, not ‘selling more toys’

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. 
Kreiz always had an interest in business, having invested his bar mitzvah money in stocks. But a pivotal moment came while he was studying for his MBA at UCLA Anderson business school. It was there he met Haim Saban, a fellow Israeli who would become his mentor. Saban is best known for bringing Power Rangers to the screen in the 1990s and Kreiz went to work for him, eventually co-founding the Fox Kids Europe cable channel. Fox Kids was part of Saban’s Fox Family Worldwide network, which was later acquired by Walt Disney.
Kreiz went on to run Endemol, which produced the Big Brother reality series, and spent 15 years in London. He then moved to Los Angeles as chief executive of Maker Studios, a short-form digital video company that was also bought by Disney. 
Making the jump from television to running one of the world’s largest toy companies was a no-brainer, he says. “All of the companies I’ve been involved with were creative organisations. The opportunity in all of them [was] to take creative content, creative talent and build a commercial model around them.”
His new strategy at Mattel does not just cover film production. The company continues to make and sell toys, but Kreiz has streamlined its operations, selling one factory and closing four others. The company also cut its corporate non-manufacturing workforce by more than a third to 8,500, reducing costs by US$1 billion in his first three years as CEO. 
Mattel toys are made in several Asian countries, including China, and under Kreiz the company has diversified its supply chain, increasing the size of its operations in Mexico, for example. He says this was more about equipping the supply chain to respond to demand quickly, as it did with the launch of the new “Weird Barbie” doll on the back of the film, than geopolitical tensions between the US and China: “I wouldn’t say we’re completely insular or that there’s no impact in terms of what happens in geopolitics. But we have a much more dynamic and flexible supply chain . . . and it became a competitive advantage.” 
Shortly after we meet, Channel 4’s Dispatches programme airs a report alleging harassment and unsafe working conditions at a Mattel factory in southern China. I contact Kreiz, who says the company has launched an independent investigation into the concerns raised and “take[s] them seriously”.
Disney looms large in Kreiz’s career. When he describes his vision for Mattel, it brings to mind the Mouse House boss Bob Iger’s views on brands and creativity — and how they can power different businesses.
Disney’s stories and characters appear on television and in movies, drive sales of everything from action figures to lunch boxes, and help sell theme park tickets. Kreiz talks about “brand purpose” and the “cultural relevance” of the Mattel IP library, which includes household names such as Thomas & Friends (better known in the UK as Thomas the Tank Engine), Hot Wheels and Bob the Builder.
One early move he made was to change the way Mattel thinks about the people who buy its toys and games “not just as consumers, but as fans”.
Kreiz points out that Disney’s roots lie in its founder’s hand-drawn animations. “You can start the journey being an owner of animated characters. You can start a journey being a comic book publisher or you can start a journey being a toy company.” What Mattel sells is “tactile,” he adds. “Fans start to build the relationship with our brands very early [so] the level of emotional connection and engagement that our audience has with our brand is that much higher.”
Iger himself could not have said it better. Such has been the impact of the strategy change at Mattel that Kreiz’s name has been mentioned in Hollywood chatter about potential successors to Iger when he eventually retires. (Disney last month said that would be in 2026.) I ask Kreiz if he fancies the job but he does not want to comment. 
Is he deliberately taking a leaf out of the Disney playbook at Mattel? “I admire the company,” he admits. “And, yes, there are many aspects of what they do that manifest here.” There are other successes he wants to emulate, he says, pointing to rival Hasbro, which turned its Transformers toys into multiple hit movies, and Lego, which made hit films “out of bricks with no characters”. Mattel, meanwhile, “owns some of the most iconic characters in modern culture”.
So what next? A Bob the Builder movie starring Robert Downey Jr as the eponymous British construction worker grappling with green building regulations? Not exactly, but there are more films in the works: Mattel has 17 in “active development”, including a Masters of the Universe movie with Amazon, a Hot Wheels adaptation from Star Wars director JJ Abrams at Warner Bros, and a Major Matt Mason astronaut picture starring Tom Hanks.
“We have projects in development with big talent and the beauty is that they are across multiple genres and creative takes.” Most importantly, Kreiz says, is “trusting the creative leads”. I wonder if this was hard to do with the very modern reframing of the Barbie character by the film’s director, Greta Gerwig and the portrayal of Mattel as a faceless, male-dominated corporation.
Gerwig, though, was given free rein. When she was hired “she was a young, 35-year-old director who never made a commercial, big-budget movie. But she was a true creator, an auteur, that had a very unique voice, with a clear vision.” 
She came to the Mattel offices and “studied the brand”, Kreiz says. Contractually, the company had approval rights and ultimate control over the character. “But it never came to that . . . it was never about control or approval. It was always about trust. Trusting the creative process. Not once was there a moment where we had to ask or push or try to change her ideas.” 
The next raft of filmmakers making Mattel movies will have taken note. “The idea is to apply the same approach, the same creative process, where you attract creative talent that have a relationship with our brand. Empower them, trust them and create a playground where they can imagine and interpret and be creative.”
Imagine that: Creative freedom in Hollywood from a toy company. He laughs. “Nobody wants to feel they’re making a glorified commercial for a toy.”
Matthew Garrahan © 2024 The Financial Times.