Greta Gerwig, the Hollywood director famed for her Barbie movie, must have been nervous when she first presented her script to Ynon Kreiz, the suited, serious and deadpan boss of Mattel. As chief executive and chairman of the toy company that owns Barbie, he could have demanded a rewrite ahead of filming.
“In that script, Barbie is a fascist,” recalls Kreiz, with a glint in his eyes. “Mattel is the worst in corporate America and I am a chauvinist buffoon. I thought … it’s brilliant.”
Many chief executives might have recoiled at the idea of being satirised on the big screen. But Kreiz, whose company also owns and makes Hot Wheels cars, Magic 8 balls and the Uno card game, just shrugs. “We take what we do very seriously. But we don’t take ourselves very seriously.”
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Nice line. But I’m not inclined to believe that he doesn’t take himself seriously. This is a man who prefers to watch television from his treadmill rather than his sofa; a chief executive who, I suspect, thoughtfully scripts his answers to questions like these.
I’m with Kreiz on the sort of day that might make him wonder why he bothered leaving London, his home of 15 years, for Los Angeles. It’s tipping it down in El Segundo, LA’s sprawling airport city. Mattel’s sand volleyball courts are deserted this Friday lunchtime.
“Normally you would see the Hollywood sign,” sighs Kreiz, a youthful 60-year-old, as he surveys the thick, grey blanket covering the skyline from his spacious office. “You would see the mountains. You would see Malibu.”
There’s certainly a metaphor here. I’m visiting Mattel’s head office, a short Hot Wheels-themed shuttle bus ride away from its design centre, not long before Donald Trump is due to unveil the details of his “liberation day” tariff blitz.
As we meet, it seems like this might all turn out to be a big deal for companies that import goods from China to the US. But Kreiz plays it down, pointing out that under his leadership Mattel has reduced the proportion of its toys “made in China” from 80 per cent to 40 per cent.
Unfortunately for him, Trump’s sky-high tariffs targeted not only China but several other countries — including Indonesia and Malaysia — that contain Mattel factories. These countries at least now benefit from the US president’s 90-day pause on import taxes. At the time of writing, the company’s Nasdaq-listed shares are down 24 per cent since liberation day on April 2.
Kreiz remains stoic. “This is what we do,” he says, when asked about tariffs this weekend. “We are very good at managing complexities, volatility and dynamic situations. Over the past several years we have been continuously optimising and diversifying our manufacturing footprint. It is a competitive advantage for Mattel. We are a very resilient company with the best people on the ground to help manage through this uncertainty.”
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If tariffs do hit Mattel’s manufacturing business as badly as investors evidently fear, Kreiz might at least be able to claim some vindication for his wider business plan. Since taking the top job seven years ago, he has sought to establish Mattel as a company that trades not just in tariff-sensitive plastic toys but in intellectual property (IP), as demonstrated by the Barbie film, which was produced and distributed by Warner Bros Discovery.
“The opportunity that I saw was to come in and change the way the company thought of itself,” he says. “The toy business is great. But I want to use that as a platform to expand the business and shift from being a toy manufacturer to an IP company.” This means “not just selling items, but managing franchises”.
Kreiz, a father of four and husband to the Israeli former Olympic sailor Anat Fabrikant Kreiz, was born and raised in Tel Aviv, where he collected Hot Wheels cars. His father was an engineer and his mother, who was brought up in the UK, a psychologist. He describes his upbringing as “middle class”.
A sports-obsessed child, he adopted Manchester United as his football team and remembers going to see them beat Birmingham City 1-0 to celebrate his bar mitzvah. He didn’t enter the world of business until he was 30, having spent his 20s completing military service, studying at Tel Aviv University and working as a windsurfing instructor in the Caribbean.
Kreiz, a film buff, moved to LA to earn an MBA in 1993 at Anderson School of Management, part of the University of California, Los Angeles. “UCLA was very formative in really breaking me into the American business culture and ecosystem,” he says. “And I wanted to get into media and entertainment, so it was a great entry into Hollywood being a student here.”
During his studies, he proved himself an adept networker — and his big break came when Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media mogul behind Power Rangers, took him on as a business partner. After he had proved himself, Kreiz was dispatched by Saban to London in 1997 to launch Fox Kids in Europe.
After that business was sold to Disney, he enjoyed a brief sojourn at British venture capital firm Balderton before becoming chief executive of Endemol, the Netherlands-based TV producer behind Big Brother.
Endemol’s then UK boss, Tim Hincks, recalls that Kreiz, thanks to his honed physique and dry manner, was pigeonholed as a “sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger, alpha kind of figure … actually, he is subtle, he’s clever and he gets people’s psychology”.
Kreiz was drawn back to LA in 2012 to head Maker Studios, which operated a vast network of YouTube channels and was acquired by Disney two years later for $500 million. He left the business in 2016 and went on to take board positions at Warner Music and then Mattel, a world-famous toy manufacturer that had fallen on hard times.
The board’s 2018 decision to appoint Kreiz as chief executive and chairman came as a surprise, even to friends. “I didn’t see it coming,” says Jeffrey Katzenberg, a former Disney executive who went on to lead Shrek maker DreamWorks.
Before he took the top job at Mattel, Katzenberg had viewed Kreiz as more “financial engineer” than “operator” or company frontman. “He’s exceeded everybody’s expectations,” he says now. “I think even his own.”
Founded in 1945, Mattel owns some of the world’s biggest children’s brands — including Polly Pocket, Fisher-Price, Thomas the Tank Engine and Barney, the purple dinosaur. But Kreiz’s perception was that it had lost some of its magic.
The 2017 bankruptcy of Toys “R” Us, and the losses of some lucrative Disney princess and Frozen doll licences, meant Mattel was loss-making and shrinking when Kreiz became the company’s fourth chief executive in four years. He set about cutting job numbers and axing factories to improve profits.
The idea of creating a live-action Barbie movie had been kicked around by various bosses of Mattel. Kreiz made it his mission to bring the doll to life, and within weeks he had persuaded star actor Margot Robbie to meet him at LA’s Polo Lounge, an exclusive venue inside the Beverly Hills Hotel where an iced latte sets you back $20. “The conversation was: ‘This is not a movie to sell toys … it’s about creating a cultural event, and we want to break convention and do something that will stand out’.”
Robbie was sold on the idea of playing Barbie, and she helped bring in Warner Bros and Gerwig. Later, Ryan Gosling was drafted in as Ken, and Will Ferrell was given the task of playing Mattel’s sinister chief executive. Kreiz laughs off the depiction of himself and Mattel, but is keen to point out that this is not based in reality. “It depicts the Mattel board as being all-male,” he notes. “Half of our board — five of ten — are women.”
He adds: “We were not just willing to accept [Gerwig’s] narrative, but embrace and amplify it — all in service of the movie. Because the role that Mattel played and the role that my alter-ego played in the movie, in the form of Will Ferrell, was all part of the story.”
The film topped global box-office takings in 2023, grossing $1.4 billion. The terms of Mattel’s deal with Warner Bros are not disclosed, but the film boosted the toymaker’s revenues by $125 million in 2023, including through enhanced toy sales.
For Kreiz, Barbie was the prototype for his vision — positioning his doll, first unveiled to the world in 1959, as “not just a toy” but a “pop culture icon”.
So, will there be a Barbie II? “We haven’t spoken publicly about another Barbie movie. But we did say publicly that our goal is to create film franchises, you know, for all of our brands.” Which sounds, despite Kreiz’s strict adherence to the corporate script, like a resounding yes.
His ambitions don’t stop there. Mattel is due to open two amusement parks in the US over the next couple of years and it has 14 other films at various stages. Masters of the Universe is in production in London ahead of release in June 2026, while Matchbox, starring John Cena and based on the original die-cast toys, is being made in Morocco.
But can any of these films top Barbie? “Absolutely, yes,” says Kreiz. “There’s no limit. There’s no ceiling for innovation and creativity. At the same time, we know that not every movie will be the next Barbie. But you don’t need a Barbie-level success for movies to have a real impact on Mattel.”
The recent stock market collapse aside, Kreiz’s time at Mattel has established him as a force and a name that raises heads in LA and beyond. He is even tipped by some as a potential successor to Bob Iger at Disney, Hollywood’s entertainment behemoth.
When I put this to him, he appears — for the first and only time during this interview — to lose sight of his virtual script, if only for a few seconds. “Yeah, I’m … I’m so happy here, with what I do here,” he says, before recovering his composure.
“I’m very focused on the day-to-day and the opportunity we have with Mattel. It’s still early — we are on a journey, even though, financially, we’ve covered a lot of distance already. But it’s a special company, with great assets and great opportunities far beyond what we do today.”
When I tell him that, if nothing else, such talk is an endorsement of his achievements at Mattel, he again seems slightly lost for a response. He manages: “Thank you for saying that.”
