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.”
