Honestly, the only surprising thing about the news that Universal is planning a Barbie movie is that it didn't happen sooner. Universal has been the most aggressive among all the studios when it comes to making movies off inane toys, and Barbie, well, is the Queen Bee of them all.

According to Variety, Laurence mark will produce the film based on the doll, who has been the subject of 16 direct-to-video animated movies in the past. According to Mattel's senior VP Richard Dickson, "The brand wasn't ready fo ra movie until now," when what he really means is that the moviegoing public wasn't primed for this kind of crap masked as filmmaking until Optimus Prime ate all our brain cells and Hollywood studios never looked back.

I mean, whatever. I'm not the target audience for this movie, and if a Bratz movie already happened, there's no way this can be worse. Between this news and the He-Man news, I'm mostly just concerned by the fact that the existence of these movies assumes that people my age have children, and that makes me old.