Barbie finally got her own live-action movie. What took so long?

The “Barbie” movie was in development hell for years, but just as Barbie managed to escape from Barbieland, the “Barbie” movie has landed in theaters with a jaw-dropping opening weekend box office of $162 million — the biggest North American opening weekend for a female director.

The film’s smashing box office success begs the question — why did it take so long for Barbie to become a real girl in a live-action world?

Of course, this isn’t Barbie’s first movie — it’s her 43rd, but Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are the first live-action Barbie and Ken (along with the half a dozen other Barbies and Kens in the Barbie movie, because every Barbie is Barbie. Does Barbie live some kind of simultaneous reincarnated life? Is she one soul split into many bodies? Is she a metaphor for our common humanity? Is she a hivemind parasite taking over each doll until every doll is Barbie?).

I loved dolls growing up. All kinds of dolls: Barbies, action figures, baby dolls, Polly Pockets with their teeny tiny ponytails and fruit-shaped foldable houses, and paper dolls that you could draw yourself, with names written in pencil on the back.

The beauty of a doll is that how you play with it is pretty open. Kids can focus on the fashion, build doll houses out of cardboard boxes, play out soap operas, build fantasy worlds with friends or by themselves.

I loved my Barbie dolls because there was so much potential for drama. My Barbies rarely changed outfits, were constantly barefoot, and were often under threat of disaster. A flood washed away their homes and they had to cling to a ship like in the biblical epic Noah’s ark. An evil mayor (a Christmas Barbie who came in a sparkly green dress with a silver sash that just screamed fabulous evil stepmother) tried to undermine the power of a Barbie princess. It was very joyful and very serious business.

While Barbie the doll is beloved, Barbie the icon is fraught, or as the common internet parlance would put it: problematic. The OG Barbie, a leggy blonde, is renowned for her unrealistic proportions — her giraffe-like neck and a playboy figure. Women are the inheritors of many impossible physical ideals, and Barbie has certainly perpetuated them. (In 2011, she underwent a redesign to add more body types and complexions to Barbie’s many faces.)

But we all contain multitudes, especially the many faces of Barbie. She is also a Career Woman, with more than 200 jobs to her name, a professional absurdity that the movie makes the most of.

Maybe Barbie’s complexities are why it was so difficult to bring a live action “Barbie” movie into the world. According to reporting from Collider, discussion of a live action “Barbie” movie began in 2009, just a few years after the 2007 “Transformers” movie made $708 million in worldwide box office — demonstrating the commercial appeal of live action movies based on nostalgic toy brands — and before “The Lego Movie” and GI Joe graced the silver screen. Even with stars like Anne Hathaway and Amy Schumer attached to the project, Barbie never found her moment.

Where others have failed, director Greta Gerwig and star/producer Margot Robbie have succeeded.

Robbie has household name recognition after her pig-tailed, short-short wearing, bad-guy-bashing time as Harley Quinn and memorable performances in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “I, Tonya” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” She brings a sincere wonder to the role of Barbie.

Gerwig is the director behind “Lady Bird” and the 2019 “Little Women” adaptation. Just like the “Barbie” movie, both of Gerwig’s previous films are centered on mother-daughter relationships.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled about why Barbie hasn’t added “blockbuster movie star” to her list of careers until 2023, but maybe it has more to do with her many, many female fans, high-femme aesthetic, and her affinity for pink.

Was it really that much easier to make a movie about outer space robots coming to save planet Earth from other alien robots — who by the way, can all transform into cars — than to make a movie about a doll accidentally ripping a hole between universes and crossing the seas, the mountains, the foliage covered fall campgrounds, the summer fields overseen by windmill, the far reaches of space, and the rollerblading boardwalks of Venice Beach to enter the real world?

I’m skeptical.

Or maybe the “Barbie” movie just needed the right team attached.

Gerwig made a wonderful fourth wall-breaking romp, with speeches about feminism, choreographed dance sequences reminiscent of old Hollywood musicals, shiny plastic scenery, and an opening sequence inspired by “2001: A Space Odyssey” that could be a satisfying short film all on its own. All to say, she made creating a weird movie about a beloved and despised toy, that is also commercially successful and brand approved, look easy.

We’ll see if Mattel can replicate its fantastic-plastic-hot-pink success with a Polly Pocket movie, or a Hot Wheels movie (more Mattel products in development land) .

The tragedy and the triumph of contemporary theater-going is the plethora of sequels and overwhelmingly connected universes bringing in big bucks, and disincentivizing Hollywood from taking risks with original stories. The Barbenheimer weekend showed a strong audience appetite for stories that haven’t been told in a big screen format before, not sequels or prequels or reboots. It was also a demonstration of the power beloved directors can hold and more clearly — the power of memes, which played perhaps the biggest role in getting “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” so much hype and so many ticket sales.

The lesson Hollywood will probably take from Barbie’s box office dominance is the same lesson learned from Marvel Studios’ multiverse: nostalgic IP sells theater tickets, which may only bring us more sequels and prequels and reboots. Or maybe more toy companies will turn themselves into movie studios — I’m just not sure I want to see a live action Furby movie on the big screen.

Cathy Cook covers retail, commercial real estate and tourism for the Albuquerque Journal.