The Beanie Bubble is the story of the soft toy phenomenon that swept the world in the 1990s, as children and adults alike fell in love with Beanie Babies. For children, the appeal lay in the cute, colourful and posable plush figures — but for adults, the appeal lay in the rare limited edition Beanie Babies that quickly became collectors' items and were bought and sold for huge amounts of money on the internet.
The Beanie Bubble examines the craze from the inside, looking at the rise of Beanie Babies inventor Ty Warner and his lovable soft toys, but also examining how many other visionaries played their part in his success without getting the public credit.
Here's everything we know about The Beanie Bubble so far...
The Beanie Bubble release date
The Beanie Bubble will be released in select theatres from Friday, July 21, and will be streaming globally on Apple TV+ from Friday, July 28.
What is the plot of The Beanie Bubble?
The official synopsis for The Beanie Bubble is as follows:
"Why did the world suddenly treat stuffed animals like gold? Ty Warner was a frustrated toy salesman until his collaboration with three women grew his masterstroke of an idea into the biggest toy craze in history. The Beanie Bubble is an inventive story about what and who we value, and the unsung heroes whose names didn't appear on the heart-shaped tag."
The story takes place across multiple timelines and tells the stories of three women: business executive Robbie, whose ambition and sales skills help Ty to get his company off the ground; Maya, who joins Ty's company part-time while in college to earn some extra money, but ends up showing a talent for online marketing; and Sheila, a lighting designer who falls for Ty and whose daughters help to shape the Beanie Babies phenomenon.
"We were fascinated that America lost its mind over stuffed animals for three years in the 90s," says screenwriter and co-director Kristin Gore. "That was absurd and ridiculous on its own, but when we read these women's stories behind the phenomenon, that is what got us very excited, because we wanted to tell the underdog story behind the craze that a lot of people didn't know."
"The bubble of joy and surreal ludicrousness of the event was really attractive," adds co-director Damian Kulash, Jr. "It's so fun, but it's so rare that you find something like that and inside of it are all of the hefty themes that you'd like to be speaking about. It was like the silliest, most ridiculous thing on the outside, and yet it has all the beginnings of now, in terms of our relationship to technology, and the female relationship to the American dream, and how our system propagates itself and keeps re-rigging itself to be in favour of some people and not others."
Cast: who is in The Beanie Bubble?
The Hangover's Zach Galifianakis stars as Ty in the film, with Elizabeth Banks (Pitch Perfect) as Robbie, Geraldine Viswanathan (Miracle Workers) as Maya, and Sarah Snook (Succession) as Sheila.
"They're such powerhouses, and luckily they were drawn to the material," says Kristin. "We were immediately into Elizabeth Banks for Robbie, Sarah Snook for Sheila and Geraldine Viswanathan for Maya because they have so much depth and range and comedic and dramatic chops. We really lucked out with our cast."
"Elizabeth Banks basically is that character," says Damian. "She's an incredible actress, but she's so ambitious and ballsy, she lit up the screen with it. Geraldine, as a human and as an actor, just makes every room brighter, there's just this magic with her energy. We needed her character to be a little bit of a stand-in for ourselves at the time, she's the age that we were when that happened. Her character has this enthusiastic optimism even as she's sort of a little bit of a pessimistic punk in the world, and I can't imagine anyone else doing it better. And Sarah Snook, her innate strength and power shines through so clearly. She can take this character who's so warm, so maternal, so smiley and the opposite of Shiv [Sarah's character in Succession] and she's still the most compass-north character in the whole movie. That was really important to us — we wanted to make sure that character, who was making good choices for her family and for society at large, never comes off feeling weak in any way."
Is there a trailer for The Beanie Bubble?
There is! You can check it out below:
