Yes, Vin Diesel’s answer to ‘Barbie’ is still happening, and it looks… interesting

It’s been roughly a year and a half since Greta Gerwig first painted the town pink with Barbie, and following the film’s sensational acclaim and box office achievements, studio execs began lining up to figure out how to replicate it all.

What they concluded wasn’t that we needed more films that examine the least-navigated depths of human emotions, nor that we needed more films that spoke truth to less-championed perspectives. No, what they concluded was that we needed more films about toys. Luckily for them, Vin Diesel‘s Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots film was already on the docket, and we’ve finally gotten our first glimpse of the shape it could take.

In a recent Instagram post, the Fast & Furious leading man shared an image that looks a lot like a live-action, life-sized, militarized Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots ring, together with a caption reading “Childhood dreams coming to life…”

It’s the first real update we’ve gotten about the film since it was first announced in April 2021, when Mattel Films signed a deal with Universal Pictures and Diesel’s production company, One Race Films, to get it made. The toy itself launched in 1966, and is among Mattel’s most recognizable products.

The adaptation has been preemptively lambasted by doubters, who weren’t completely convinced that this was something more than soulless IP shilling, and who couldn’t help but draw comparisons to 2011’s Real Steel. For context, the film — helmed by Kevin McKeon and written by Ryan Engle — will follow “a father and son who form a bond with an advanced war machine,” per the official Mattel website. The machine in question is, of course, either the Red Rocker or Blue Bomber, and that description there could quite aptly summarize Real Steel as well.

All this talk of Vin Diesel and The Rock Em Sock Em Robots movies reminds me that Real Steel is actually pretty solid. Totally the kinda movie that should have gotten a Saturday morning cartoon tie in. pic.twitter.com/8BLiGhhwEG

— Caped-Joel Daly (@CapedJoel) April 19, 2021

Still, this cultural enterprise isn’t as cut and dry as that. It’s easy to look at any film based on a popular IP — especially one based on a toy rather than a story — and conclude that it’s just being mined for another “content film,” in a manner of speaking. But, it’s equally likely for that material to fall into the hands of competent-to-remarkable storytellers, who will then serve up a genuinely great film. Gerwig and Noah Baumbach proved that with Barbie, and the brain trust of Transformers One proved it again a year later.

The caveat to that, however, is that Vin Diesel is no such storyteller. All respect to his full-body commitment to the nonsense that surrounds Dominic Toretto, but this is simply not the man you rope into the proceedings when you want to accomplish some genuine storytelling. By contrast, Margot Robbie — who brought Barbie to life through her LuckyChap Entertainment label — will be bringing Monopoly and The Sims adaptations into the fray, and if we can interpret Barbie as an example of LuckyChap’s IP storytelling ambition, we ought to be very excited for whatever shape those movies end up taking.

This Instagram post, however, prophesizes the same sort of explosive volume that has epitomized the bulk of Diesel’s filmography, second only to limp and lazy narratives. Nevertheless, it would be absolutely wonderful to be proven wrong, so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.