Desperate Mattel is chucking a View-Master movie at theaters
The View-Master movie joins Barney, American Girl, Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, and, of course, Uno, on the list of Mattel movies in development
Photo: Fisher-Price via Getty Images
Look, we’re just going to go ahead and blame Greta Gerwig for this one.
After all, the Barbie director taught the fine folks at toy company Mattel that there was clearly a billion-plus dollar box office demand for its various chunks of consumer-grade plastic. And all it took to extract said cash from an eager movie-going public was a genuinely funny script with a gently satirical point of view written by two highly decorated screenwriters, a host of incredibly talented performers, several extremely elaborate musical numbers, a decent percentage of the world’s supply of bright pink paint, and a brand so instantly recognizable that pretty much every person on the planet had been exposed to it before the film came out. Why shouldn’t a View-Master movie do just as well?
This is per Variety, reporting that Mattel has now entered into agreements with Sony and Escape Artists for a film built around the 3D picture-viewing toys, which were first introduced to the market in 1939. No actual human creatives have been attached yet, of course, but the press statement did announce that the movie will be a “four-quadrant family adventure,” so, good news on that front, four-quad fams!
And, look: We can express some serious skepticism about how much thought went into all this—Mattel is also developing movies based around American Girl, Barney, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, and fucking Uno, so it’s hard not to hold a mote of cynicism about their current, uh, “efforts”—but there’s nothing that automatically guarantees a View-Master movie would have to be bad. That was one of the big takeaways from Barbie, after all: Even IP-based films are ultimately efforts of human artistry, and they soar or sink based on how much care and thought goes into them. Hell, it’s possible a View-Master movie would look cool as hell—a film that tried to match the Stereoscopic diorama look of the old-school discs would be genuinely fascinating. It’s also possible it’ll be total garbage, rushed into theaters as part of a desperate effort to tickle some cash out of the nostalgia brains of aging millennials. Either way, we’re blaming Gerwig.