The Beanie Bubble review: Apple TV+ movie struggles to extract feminist heroics from a toy craze

Hollywood can’t seem to stop pumping out origin stories for popular consumer products. We’ve already had Tetris and Air (as in Air Jordans). Blackberry is right around the corner. Miraculously, Barbie didn’t turn out to be two hours of inventor Ruth Handler yelling in boardrooms about smooth crotches. It all feels like capitalism in hyperdrive. And now we’ve got The Beanie Bubble.

This star-studded Apple TV+ film attempts to stand out from the pack, however. It’s not really, it claims, about the rise and fall of the Beanie Baby, Ty’s travel-sized stuffed animals that took over the Nineties. Supposedly, it’s about the three women – Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), and Sheila (Sarah Snook) – who helped shape the billion-dollar company, despite the ruinous efforts of its spoiled brat of a CEO, Ty Warner (Zach Galifianakis). Except these women are heavily fictionalised or amalgamated versions of real people, something excused by a trendy, self-satisfactory title card: “There are parts of the truth you just can’t make up. The rest we did.”

Sure, Beanies aren’t A-bombs, and there’s certainly less of a public duty not to mislead audiences here, but The Beanie Bubble is a rare case where flipping the narrative on its head feels like a disservice. Unlike shoes endorsed by legendary athletes, or a phone with its own little keyboard, the appeal of the Beanie Baby isn’t quite so straightforward. They’re cute, yes, with their tiny button eyes and floppy limbs (itself a Ty-led innovation), but that hardly explains why the collectors market for them became so briefly lucrative and viciously competitive – remember the embittered couple photographed arguing for Beanie Baby custody in divorce court in 1999? Their entire collection carefully lined up in front of them?

There are a handful of answers to be found in The Beanie Bubble, but the biggest mysteries surrounding the toys remain unsolved. Instead, the married filmmakers behind the film, Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash, interweave the women’s narratives to demonstrate how manipulative men tend to move in circles. Ty, with his posse of plush Himalayan cats, an early product of his, convinces these women that he’s doting, wholesome, and childlike. It seems to unlock some socially programmed impulse in them to serve as his emotional rock and surrogate mother. Soon enough – surprise, surprise – the women find their ideas and their autonomy being ripped right out from under them.

The Beanie Bubble is as direct and plainly articulated as you might expect from Gore, the daughter of former vice president Al, or anyone raised in political circles. Kulash is the lead vocalist of OK Go, a band who went viral in the mid-2000s for a music video choreographed on treadmills, and the film carries over some of that instinct for low-stakes set pieces (the opening scene sees a truck crash fling hundreds of Beanies across an American highway). Galifianakis, too, is convincing here, playing Warner’s sweetness in a way that seems sincere to its targets and blatantly performative to anyone on the outside.

The women, of course, eventually liberate themselves from Warner’s trap in order to achieve monetary success. Good for them, I guess. But when The Beanie Bubble deploys the line, “We didn’t bail. We leaned in,” it’s impossible to tell whether the film is genuinely or ironically deploying that brand of period-accurate, corporate boot-licking feminism. If these women profited from the Beanie Baby trend, which then famously imploded, it was at the cost of those who suffered real economic damage because Ty tried to market their product as an investment opportunity. The Beanie Bubble is convinced there’s a victory buried in this story somewhere. It’s just not clear who or what we should be celebrating.

Dir: Kristin Gore, Damian Kulash. Starring: Zach Galifianakis, Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook, Geraldine Viswanathan. 15, 110 minutes.

‘The Beanie Bubble’ streams on Apple TV+ from 28 July