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FORTUNE.COM // DECEMBER 2019
Dutch producer of reality-TV shows burdened
with debt from a private equity buyout. Kreiz
spent his time trying to cut costs and reduce
debt in a worsening economy. He calls it a for-
mative experience—and a less-than-successful
one. “Endemol had similar challenges to Mattel
but less opportunity,” he says. After a stint in
venture capital, Kreiz landed in Los Angeles as
CEO of Maker Studios, a struggling producer
of user-generated videos. Maker was nearly out
of cash when Kreiz arrived in 2012. Four years
later, he sold it to Disney for $500 million.
Another short Disney stay preceded Kreiz’s
next gig. In 2016, media executive Edgar
Bronfman Jr. and Russian billionaire Leonard
Blavatnik recruited him to their investor group
that was bidding for magazine maker Time
Inc., then the owner of Fortune. The plan was
for Kreiz to run the company. The two sides
never reached a deal, and Time later sold to a
rival publisher, Meredith, whose finances have
suffered from digesting the Time titles. Bronf-
man says Kreiz made sure the group didn’t
overpay. “What was clear from day one to both
of us was that there was a price at which this
made sense and a price at which it didn’t,” says
Bronfman. “He never lost sight of that.”
With time on his hands, Kreiz joined the
board of Mattel in the middle of Geor-
giadis’s tenure. In short order he became
executive chairman and CEO. His first goal
was to simplify what had become an overly
complicated company. “Before I joined,
there was a three-inch-thick strategy docu-
ment,” says Kreiz, sitting in what he dryly
calls his “ocean view” office, across the street from a runway at Los
Angeles International Airport. “I brought it down to one page.”
That page divided Mattel’s to-do list into three categories, ranked
in order of urgency: cut costs, fix broken brands, and capture value
from Mattel’s intellectual property.
The cost-cutting is in early phases: Kreiz plans to sell 12 of Mat-
tel’s 13 factories, for example, but has sold only one so far. The last
goal, what Kreiz calls “IP monetization,” is shorthand for Mattel
becoming a media company. It’s a through line that maps Kreiz’s
career. “All these companies were about managing talent,” he says
of his previous jobs. “In a lot of these properties, there is a nar-
rative even if there is not a script.” Getting those scripts written,
literally, is Mattel’s most important bet on the future.ATTEL HAS BEEN TRYING to make movies for years. An
earlier Hot Wheels project, for example, had been
kicked around Hollywood to no avail. In 2010,
movie-business trades buzzed that director Wolfgang
Petersen had teamed up with Mattel to make a movie
based on Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robot. It never happened. In 2014,
Sony began developing a live-action version of Barbie, originallyHOT WHEELER-DEALER
Veteran producer
Robbie Brenner is
brokering movie deals
around Mattel’s toy
brands. The company
now has eight projects
in the works.