Barbie (2023) ticks every box that a modern girl dreams of: it’s hyper feminine, incredibly ‘meta’, existential and an original screenplay instead of a reboot. If you’re anything like us, you’ve already prebooked your tickets and planned your pink outfits for opening night, ready for a Barbenheimer double feature.

The reemerging popularity of Barbie may be driven by capitalism and the rise of product-based movies, blatantly aiming to rebrand and make money. In the 2010s, Mattel’s Barbie sales went down for three consecutive years and, before the movie adaptation, Bratz was the moment, the ‘cool doll’ of choice. While we’re aware that pitting one plastic figurine against another is just playing into the problem, Barbie’s incredible marketing campaign and the discourse surrounding its popularity has made us wonder why the Bratz movie was such wasted potential.

In 2007, Bratz premiered their first and only live action, centring on the best friends’ first year in high school. A stereotypical mean girl, Meredith, sections them into the school ‘cliques’, which initially drives them apart before they ‘find themselves’ and rediscover their friendship, performing in the school talent show. Sounds boring? It kind of is. While it has enough fun montages, songs and outfits to keep you watching, it’s forgettable and very cliché.

While Greta Gerwig has managed to craft a winning film that caters to both kids and adults (comparable to the sold-out success of End Game), the core matter of the Bratz universe provides a recipe for something much greater than the teen flick it was originally made into, with arguably just as much potential for iconic scenes as Barbie.

Who are you? Cloe, Sasha, Jade or Yasmin?

The animated Bratz movies are actively diverse, unlike Barbie’s side characters that play second fiddle to the blonde herself, with a running theme of friendship at the root of most plots – in Bratz, everyone is the main character and you always have a different, equally important character to choose from.

The Devil Wears Pink

The Bratz series also ‘toys’ with the idea that the friends start a fashion magazine, finding somewhat of a ‘Miranda Priestly’ rival in Burdine Maxwell, a parody of a pink-loving Barbie doll. The opportunities are endless.

Gen Z

Bratz has acquired an older, more ‘cult’ like following because it has grown with their original audience. The popularity of the Bratz Instagram account, which has 1.2 million followers, demonstrates this. This is especially impressive considering that MGA Entertainment Inc. lacks the conglomerate status and enormous marketing budget of Mattel (the Bratz live action cost a measly $20 million dollars compared to the whopping $145 million of Barbie).

This hypothetical Bratz film could let go of a strictly PG rating and resonate with this specific niche of older Gen Z and Millennial women. Bratz could be the indie, edgier alternative to the Barbieverse. The animated snippets they periodically release based on iconic movie and television scenes, from Scream to Euphoria, are a testament to this. If not a live action, at least give us another animated movie.