How Margot Robbie built the powerhouse movie production company behind ‘Barbie’

“I remember saying, ‘Every time I pick up a script, I want to play the guy,’” Robbie told the Hollywood Reporter in 2020. “Wouldn’t it be so cool if people pick up scripts that we’re making and always wanted to play the female role?’” 

Sensing a gap in the market for female leads, she took matters into her own hands alongside friends Sophia Kerr, Josey McNamara, and now-husband Tom Ackerly: Together, they built a powerhouse movie production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, with the goal of making stories for and by women. “There’s only so much you can do as an actor,” Robbie once told Marie Claire, explaining that producers are the ones involved in hiring and pay.

Guided by the motto, “If it’s not a f**k, yes, it’s a no,” LuckyChap has since grown into an empowering powerhouse. The company told the Wall Street Journal it only greenlights 1% of proposals, among them: I, Tonya, Promising Young Woman, and Birds of Prey, which collectively raked in over $275 million. Its latest production, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, was a historical money-maker that surpassed $1 billion in box office sales in the first two weeks alone. 

Despite such success, getting rich isn’t LuckyChap or Robbie’s overarching goal. “If we were money-oriented people, we’d probably be working in a different industry,” Robbie said in the Hollywood Reporter interview. Rather, they aim to provide a “platform” for young directors and women creatives.

Changing Hollywood

LuckyChap released its first movie in 2017: I, Tonya, about former figure skater Tonya Harding and her link to the attack on competitor Nancy Kerrigan, which turned into a smash hit grossing more than $58 million in box offices worldwide on a comparatively low budget of $11 million. It was an ambitious project; Robbie attributed part of the studios’ go-getter attitude as being “too young and dumb” to understand the undertaking at the time—but they were sold on the script. Robbie starred in the film herself, using her star power to get the group’s foot in the door. The long-term goal was to have a “very established production company with a varied body of work and hopefully critical acclaim” that “would be its own entity, not ‘Margot Robbie’s company,’” she told Vogue Australia in 2018.

Even with I, Tonya’s success, LuckyChaps didn’t want to rest on its laurels; the company told the Hollywood Reporter that they needed to prove they weren’t a one hit wonder. After hanging their ice skates up, the studio, which had cemented deals with Amazon for television and Warner Brothers for film, churned out films Birds of Prey and Promising Young Women and T.V. series like Maid and Dollface, all female-fronted projects. Robbie also used LuckyChaps to greenlight initiatives like a six week writing paid program for female writers.

The hard work hasn’t come without a cost, though; Robbie admitted to Vogue that she’s missed out on life events: “Having a business is stressful and time-consuming, but it’s incredibly rewarding,” she said. Still though, she added, “work never feels like work to me” because her partners are her best friends—a closeness they use to their advantage to bring the business to its full potential.

The group is selective about what they choose, but when they’re in, they’re in, with a characteristic boldness, fun nature, and persistence. LuckyChap “isn’t pandering to Hollywood or anyone else,” Emerald Fennell, director of Promising Young Woman, told the Journal. “They stand behind you and don’t care if it gets them into trouble.”

Sticking up for their creatives has helped distinguish the studio from the crowd and paved the way for an existential and boundary-pushing movie that somehow got a corporation’s stamp of approval: Barbie. 

Come on Barbie, let’s go Barbie

Whispers of a Barbie movie began in 2009 as it bounced around various writer and producer groups. LuckyChaps grabbed the project out of production hell in 2016 when Robbie entered initial talks for the starring role. Robbie told Time she emphasized to Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz that her company wanted to respect the brand’s history while including criticism. She wanted to surprise moviegoers, aware that people assumed what the movie would look like with her as Barbie.

With her eyes set on Gerwig as director, Robbie fully sold the project in a meeting with Mattel and Warner Brothers, describing the duo of Barbie and Gerwig as iconic as “dinosaurs and [Steven] Spielberg” (referring to Jurassic Park), estimating the movie could make $1 billion, per Collider.

And so the project became the company’s “Everest,” as McNamara described it. Balancing the legacy of Mattel with a pointed script by Gerwig and her partner, fellow creative Noah Baumbach, proved to be a hard act, but one that Robbie was up to the challenge of. Barbie itself and its legacy came with a “laundry list of concerns,” Robbie told the New York Times. Still, LuckyChap gave the writers creative freedom; Vogue reported that no one saw the script until it was finished. 

From talking through lines for six hours and even acting out a scene for the president of Mattel, LuckyChap was successful in their negotiations to film how they wanted; they were able to convince studios to let them call Barbie “stereotypical Barbie” and keep a scene that Gerwig calls the “heart of the movie.” They were awarded a $150 million marketing budget that made Barbie pervasive for months before it hit the theaters, no doubt contributing to its status as this summer’s blockbuster and a record-setting one at that (Gerwig is now the first solo-female director to helm a billion-dollar movie).

As for what’s next for LuckyChap, Robbie isn’t jumping on a Barbie sequel. But there are murmurs that LuckyChap has several works in production—a Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts body swap movie, a film based off of Disney ride Big Thunder Mountain, an adaptation of best-selling novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” and more. Not just for being lucky, but smart too, Robbie and crew are plunging forward with the same combination of stubborn supportiveness and laidback fun to other women driven projects.