When I heard that The Bear star, Julia Roberts-esque fashion icon, perfect Letterboxd user, and all-around sweetie angel Ayo Edebiri would be writing—and potentially starring in—a live-action Barney movie for Mattel and A24, I initially felt…conflicted.
On the one hand, the Hollywood children’s-IP bubble feels like it has burst; Barbie fever came and went two summers ago and Lena Dunham isn’t even making that Polly Pocket movie anymore. On the other, I mean it from the bottom of my heart when I say that I would watch Ayo Edebiri do anything, including her taxes and/or filing her nails. Edebiri was by far my favorite part of the 2023 film Theater Camp (I still use her line “I don’t like this type of…voice” on a regular basis), and that same year she crushed it in Emma Seligman’s Bottoms as a nerdy lesbian trying to fight-club her way into kissing girls. (Another perfectly delivered Edebiri line: “Once, a girl tried to kill me with rat poison, so I took her outside and I punched her ’til she died.”)
We don’t know much about the live-action Barney movie at this point, except that Daniel Kaluuya is meant to produce it and, according to Mattel exec Kevin McKeon, the film will be adult-oriented and “surrealistic.” But if Edebiri is on board to write, I’m fairly confident that the end result will be something I want to see. Is she going to put on a giant purple dinosaur suit and actually become Barney in a literal sense? Somehow, I doubt it, but honestly, to paraphrase Edebiri herself, I’m seated. The theater employees are scared and asking me to leave because it’s “not confirmed that Edebiri is even starring yet,” but I’m simply too seated.
