carrybuh — 1 year ago(November 01, 2024 11:41 AM)

She had been working on the project for 3 years and even had a finished script, but she felt she wasn't able to do it as well as "Barbie" was done so she quit.
https://variety.com/2024/film/news/lena-dunham-drops-polly-pocket-film-1236063276/
Lena Dunham revealed in a new interview with The New Yorker that she is no longer attached to Mattel’s “Polly Pocket” movie, which was announced back in 2021 with the “Girls” creator writing and directing and “Emily in Paris” favorite Lily Collins set to star. The film, along with Barney and Hot Wheels, is one of several projects Mattel had its in development pipeline as a follow-up to last year’s blockbuster “Barbie.” It turns out Greta Gerwig’s Oscar winner provided Dunham with the clarity she needed to put ‘Polly Pocket” aside.
“I’m not going to make the Polly Pocket movie,” Dunham announced. “I wrote a script, and I was working on it for three years. But I remember someone once said to me about Nancy Meyers: the thing that’s the most amazing about her is that the movie she makes or the movie she would be making with or without a studio, with or without notes — that somehow her taste manages to intersect perfectly with what the world wants. What a ****ing gift that is. And Nora Ephron, too, who was such a mentor to me, but always said, ‘Go be weird. Don’t kowtow to anyone.'”
“I think Greta [Gerwig] managed this incredible feat [with ‘Barbie’], which was to make this thing that was literally candy to so many different kinds of people and was perfectly and divinely Greta,” Dunham continued. “And I just — I felt like, unless I can do it that way, I’m not going to do it. I don’t think I have that in me. I feel like the next movie I make needs to feel like a movie that I absolutely have to make. No one but me could make it. And I did think other people could make ‘Polly Pocket.'”