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Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ show The Studio has a compelling character at the centre; a studio executive who loves cinema but is forced to churn out endless soulless dreck based on increasingly miserable IP. In real life, however, it would be silly to assume that someone would be creatively barren enough to make a film based on Kool-Aid. And this is because in real life people are creatively barren enough to make a film about Toys R Us.
Variety has reported that a live-action Toys R Us movie is in the works, made by Toys R Us Studios which is apparently a real thing that exists in the world. The movie is said to be a live-action film, along the lines of Night at the Museum and Big, which “aims to capture that childhood wonder in a modern, fast-paced adventure that taps into the Toys R Us brand’s relevance across its more than 70 years in the toy industry.” And quite frankly this couldn’t have come soon enough, because if my children have been crying out for anything, it’s a film about the brand relevance of a shop.
This is where we are. First they made films about people. Then they made films about toys. And now they’re making films about the shops where people buy toys. The logical endpoint of this are films about the various industrial components that are manufactured to build the shops where people buy toys. Again, I am all for this. If anyone in Hollywood needs someone to write a fast-paced Jumanji-style adventure movie based on the Hitachi Primairy R32 light commercial inverter heat pump split system commercial air conditioning unit, please do get in touch because this exact thing has long been my dream.
Obviously we have Barbie to blame for this. For years, films based on brands were just about as low-rent as you could get, appealing to the audience’s sense of baseline recognition over other factors such as talent or quality. Nobody went to see the Battleship movie because it looked good; they either went to see it because they were prompted by dull nostalgia or they happened to be bizarre Rihanna completists.
But Barbie changed all that. Barbie was self-aware and auteur-driven, and demonstrated that there was a way to slightly elevate miserable brand properties. So now we live in a world where JJ Abrams is making a “grounded and gritty” Hot Wheels movie and Daniel Kaluuya is producing a Barney the Dinosaur film that is apparently heavily influenced by the work of Charlie Kaufman.
To the credit of Toys R Us, their movie doesn’t sound anywhere near as sophisticated as this. It sounds like the retail version of Ready Player One, where hundreds of immediately identifiable toy characters will come to life and playfully terrorise (I’m guessing) Jack Black for one hour and 28 minutes.
But still, Toys R Us? In the year 2025? The same Toys R Us that filed for bankruptcy and closed its UK stores in 2017 before announcing new ones last year? The same Toys R Us that has zero brand recognition among its target audience? The same Toys R Us that, even for those old enough to have visited in its pomp, is best remembered for its absolute and total lack of any magic whatsoever? Based on my experience, that means the Toys R Us movie is going to be one of two things: it’s either going to be a movie about a chilly warehouse that smells vaguely of urine, or it’s going to be very inventive indeed.
I suppose, if nothing else, Toys R Us does at least have an identifiable corporate mascot in the form of Geoffrey the Giraffe. So at the very least it won’t just be a transparent attempt to try and mash a recognisable narrative out of 70 years of distantly familiar toy brands. It will be a transparent attempt to to mash a recognisable narrative out of 70 years of distantly familiar toy brands that has a massive lifelike giraffe in it. Rejoice, everyone, for cinema is saved.
