The Horror Movie Mattel Needs To Make After Barbie
Move over Tom Cruise, "Barbie" is set to take over theaters this weekend and is perfectly poised to make a great first impression at the box office. With an almost guaranteed success on the horizon, the massive toy conglomerate Mattel is ready to open its factory floor to Hollywood in order to create its own Mattel Cinematic Universe (a new kind of MCU that may come with a choke hazard warning). The massive buzz and marketing opportunities that have come along with the endless promotion of writer-director Greta Gerwig's latest blockbuster will be nearly impossible to recreate, but Mattel is betting on the fact that their overflowing toy chest might have a few more plastic pieces of nostalgia that could have both an artistic and commercial appeal to a mass audience.
High-profile properties like "Masters of the Universe" will certainly be bringing He-Man and his skull-faced adversary Skeletor into the cinematic fold sooner rather than later. But what about some of Mattel's other holdovers from the 1980s that would be better suited to the horror genre? As the newly minted Mattel Films begins to grow into a full-fledged studio, it could be a fairly safe bet to start developing a property that could be a family-friendly creature feature. Even though the genre still doesn't get the respect it deserves, there's no denying that horror continues to rake in the cash.
It turns out, Mattel has already devised a horror-comedy based around the Magic 8 Ball, from the writer of "Cocaine Bear," no less (a different project from the now-defunct one Blumhouse announced back in 2019). While that idea has plenty of potential given the success of something like "Ouija" from Mattel rival Hasbro, there's really only one horror-adjacent movie Mattel needs to make after "Barbie." Enter, the squishy monster toy puppets known as the Boglins.
It's time to set the Boglins free!
The Boglins, introduced during the tiny monster craze of the mid-1980s after Joe Dante's "Gremlins," were marketed as frightening rubber hand puppets that appealed to kids of all ages. With fairly ridiculous names like Dwork, Vlobb, and Drool (or Plunk and Flurp if you happened to be in the U.K.), they could be squished and squeezed to create all kinds of bizarre facial expressions. They also featured glow-in-the-dark eyes that could be controlled with a finger-operated lever located inside the head. There were the OG Boglins, small Boglins, mini Boglins, soggy Boglins called Snish, Slobster and Slogg, and even hairy Boglins that looked like warped versions of Trolls that got left out in the sun too long.
Developed by Tim Clarke, Maureen Trotto, and Larry Mass in 1987, Boglins eventually went out of production in 1994. It was mostly the clever cage-like packaging that made them stand out on toy store shelves. Kids ransacking the aisles wanted nothing more than to break them out of their cardboard prison. After being largely forgotten about aside from Ebay collectors and a hilarious horror short called "Boglins Return," the brand has stayed mostly dormant. Until ... now.
In potentially exciting news for horror fans, Mattel recently secured control of the property after almost a year of negotiations. Clearly, Mattel Films want to be in the Boglins business, just don't expect a lot of bloodshed. In a recent, highly informative report about the company's future in The New Yorker, executive producer Robbie Brenner made it clear that any move into genre will still stay completely on brand. "We're not going to make any rated-R movies," she said. "We're not going to make anything that feels violent, or that is alienating to families ... . We want to stay within the parameters of what Mattel is."
Who could possibly direct a kid-friendly Boglins movie?
After the success of IPs like "Trolls" and "The Lego Movie," which were originally looked at as hollow cash grabs, Mattel has a blueprint for how to make a Boglins movie work. There are countless characters with varying degrees of grossness that could easily populate a horror fantasy world akin to Jim Henson's "Labyrinth." After the successful attempt by Margot Robbie and Mattel Films to court Greta Gerwig to direct "Barbie," Robbie Brenner has her eye on another visionary director, Guillermo del Toro. There has already been interest from screenwriters and "millennial directors" in the Boglins property, according to The New Yorker, but obviously getting one of the greatest filmmakers alive today to take a meeting would be Mattel Films' white whale.
After adding to his Oscar gold collection with his rapturous stop-motion adaptation of "Pinocchio," del Toro may be particularly hard to get. At the Annecy animation festival this year, the filmmaker announced that he wants to focus on doing animation exclusively after a couple more live-action films. Del Toro also expressed his continued frustration with the current studio system while speaking at the festival (via The Hollywood Reporter): "They still say no to me. In the last two months, they said no to five of my projects. So it doesn't go away. Making movies is eating a sandwich of s***."
Imagine the beautiful irony, then, if del Toro managed to bypass the Hollywood system in favor of Mattel Films to create something truly original and macabre with a horror property like the Boglins. He could even help design the new rollout of Boglins puppets for what the famed toy company hopes will be its next big Halloween movie.