The idea for a live-action Barbie film was first developed at Cannon Films in the mid-1980s, and in 2009 Mattel tried again with Universal Pictures before the project stalled. In 2014 Mattel partnered with Sony, which hired many writers over the years, including Diablo Cody and Amy Schumer, who eventually left the project. When Sony's option expired in 2018, the rights moved to Warner Bros., and Margot Robbie, who had her own production company, became the lead and a producer. Robbie pitched the film to Warner Bros. and suggested it would gross over $1 billion. She then approached Greta Gerwig, who wrote the screenplay with her husband Noah Baumbach while the pair were in lockdown during the pandemic. Gerwig was given full creative freedom and wrote a script that teased Mattel's corporate culture, with Will Ferrell playing the Mattel CEO as an allegory for corporate America.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.