The Beanie Bubble will hardly produce the same craze on Apple TV+ as the stuffed-animal toys at the centre of its story. How could it? Back in the '90s, the Beanie Babies took over the US, inducing mass hysteria.
Directors Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash Jr turn the success story of businessman Ty Warner into a tale about how behind every great man there are not only great women — three in this case, we'll get to that — but also an American-Dream-fuelled capitalist system ready to support and cherish them as geniuses.
Based on Zac Bissonnette's novel The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, the Apple TV+ production mixes real story and fiction. As the movie points out in the beginning: "There are parts of the truth you just can't make up. The rest, we did".
Spanning almost twenty years, The Beanie Bubble is told from three different points of view, from Warner's first business partner and co-founder of the company Robbie Jones (Cocaine Bear's Elizabeth Banks), to employee and e-commerce pioneer Maya Kumar (Blockers' Geraldine Viswanathan), as well as his girlfriend during the '90s Sheila Harper (Succession's Sarah Snook), whose daughters took part in creating some of the toys.
It must be noted these are not their real names, since the directors wanted to distance the partially-fictional characters in the movie from their real-life counterparts. Their role in the Beanie Babies success story, though, is fairly accurate.
Jumping between timelines in a sometimes confusing narrative, the movie explains how toy salesman Ty Warner (played by Zach Galifianakis) became a millionaire thanks to a line of not particularly original stuffed-animal toys that somehow created a collective obsession.
Gore and Kulash try to delve into the reasons behind this Beanie madness, highlighting the mid-'90s technological innovations regarding the nascent online marketplace, as well a crazed culture of massive speculation and the role that private collectors — willing to pay thousands of dollars for discontinued toys — played in the whole phenomenon.
However, the movie doesn't dig too deep into these insights. Instead, it focuses on Ty's childish, narcissistic and manipulative personality, particularly directed towards the women of his life.
Galifianakis puts together the right amount of disturbing awkwardness, while Banks and Snook give solid performances as the movie relies heavily on their empowerment-driven storylines.
Still, it's Viswanathan who steals the show as the charismatic teenager-turned-marketing-genius Maya, whose mix of out-of-the-box entrepreneurship and joyous youthfulness really shines through.
Thanks to these mostly well-grounded characters, The Beanie Bubble manages to avoid being an inert, lacklustre real-life-inspired tale of capitalist madness.
Luckily, the movie takes its two most captivating aspects — the portrayal of a changing era for technology, and how the American Dream wasn't so dreamy for businesswomen — and makes them the pillars of the story.
That was definitely a good decision, since the Beanie Babies story only goes so far as an attention-grabbing, entertaining watch.
After all, if we're looking to know more about the real story, we can just tune into HBO's 2021 documentary Beanie Mania. For a fictional story, we need some extra flavour in the recipe, and The Beanie Bubble manages to put just enough of it to keep us interested.
After recent examples like Ben Affleck's Air or Apple TV's Tetris, it's clear that corporate origin stories need both a meaty story and a gripping angle to justify their existence in the fictional domain.
The Beanie Bubble finds a compelling angle with the three leading women, but too often feels like the story is simply not that interesting, or perhaps the directors weren't ambitious enough with the material at hand.
Ironically, the movie is as "understuffed" as the world-famous toys at its centre.
Regardless of the end results, there's no denying it's a toy's world this summer in Hollywood as Barbie keeps breaking box-office records, and The Beanie Bubble gets released on Apple TV+.
In the end, both of them argue that what's really interesting is the human experiences, the people's stories hidden behind a blonde pin-up doll, or the ugliest stuffed-Himalayan cat toy you've ever seen.
The Beanie Bubble is now available on Apple TV+.
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Deputy Movies Editor, Digital Spy
Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over seven years, mostly for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas.
Her work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema in the UK.
She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service.
During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world, and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London.
Now based in the UK, Mireia joined Digital Spy in June 2023 as Deputy Movies Editor.
