The Beanie Bubble - Review Thread

The AppleTV+ produced The Beanie Bubble, about the rise and fall of the BeanieBaby fad, is yet another entrant in the strange wave of business stories giving the backstories of nostalgic products that have come along this year. I’m not exactly sure why we’re suddenly getting all of these at once but in certain ways The Beanie Bubble feels like the most obviously relevant of all of them given that it’s about a speculation bubble that a bunch of fools got in on which would seem to have a certain relevance in the era of crypto currency. The film also seeks to make a statement about gender roles as it seeks to look at three women who the film considers to be unsung and abused figures within the story of the BeanieBaby phenomenon who all got screwed over by Ty Inc CEO Ty Warner. The catch is that all three of these women entered into the story at different points in the phenomenon, leaving the film with the rather awkward challenge of having to either introduce major characters part way into the film or find a more creative solution, which they do by introducing a non-chronological structure which presents all three stories simultaneously. I kind of get why they opted to try this, but I don’t think they really nail it. On the positive side, Zach Galifianakis is quite strong as Warner and Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook, and Geraldine Viswanathan are good as the three women who act as point of view characters but that can’t quite make up for the movie’s kind of mixed message. It wants to make these women into these aspirational girlbosses, which is kind of undercut by the fact that they all basically get rolled by the rich guy, and even if they weren’t it’s essentially trying to give them credit for their work in building what the film also positions as a vapid and shady enterprise to begin with so that’s maybe not something to be proud of. So, the movie’s pretty muddled but it is mostly watchable and there are interesting aspects of the story it tells.