Zach Galifianakis, Elizabeth Banks, and Sarah Snook to star in Apple's The Beanie Bubble
The feature is about the cute plush animals that spurred a commercial craze
Apple’s next feature is all about the intense and expensive drama surrounding the Beanie Baby boom of the ’90s. Zach Galifianakis, Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook, and Geraldine Viswanathan star in the film which traces the desperate search for those sacred heart-shaped tags bearing the first name of Beanie Baby creator Ty Warner. Who’s playing who has yet to be revealed, but hopefully Snook and Banks will get in a heated argument over a Princess Diana Beanie Baby.
Co-directed by Saturday Night Live alum Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash of the Grammy-winning band OK Go, The Beanie Bubble is, according to a press release, “a celebration of the women who helped power Ty Warner’s success, whose strengths and instincts shaped and amplified the phenomenon.”
The Beanie Bubble is written by Gore, who co-directs with Kulash in his directorial debut. The married directing duo developed the story together, based on Zac Bissonnette’s The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion And The Dark Side Of Cute, which explains how these toys became precious collectors items. The craze was also the subject of the recent HBO Max documentary Beanie Mania.
The Beanie Bubble marks the first film to spring from a first-look deal between Apple and Imagine Entertainment. Other upcoming Apple-Imagine projects include Black & Blues: The Colorful Ballad Of Louis Armstrong and docuseries The Supermodels.
Galifianakis will make his first live-action film appearance since 2019’s The Sunlit Room in The Beanie Bubble. He’s stuck primarily to television and voice acting roles since then, and will appear in the forthcoming Bob’s Burgers Movie. Banks will soon appear in the film Call Jane, which follows one woman’s journey to receive an abortion in the U.S., as well as the drama Signal Hill; her directorial effort Cocaine Bear is due later this year. In addition to filming the next season of HBO’s Succession, Snook was recently announced as the lead for the thriller Run Rabbit Run, taking over the role from Elisabeth Moss.