How Hollywood Has Completely Misunderstood Barbie

Even though Barbie was the biggest box office success of 2023, Hollywood’s reaction to the dramedy’s impact proves that the industry has profoundly misunderstood the movie and misread its importance. Director Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie was always going to be a tricky project. The movie needed to do justice to the cultural image of its iconic main character while also engaging with feminist critiques of Barbie. Barbie also had to be funny and accessible while providing thoughtful commentary on gender, consumerism, and the purpose of play in a productivity-driven capitalist society. The movie’s massive pre-release hype didn’t help with this huge ask.

However, Barbie’s superb cast of characters, its witty script and playful direction, and the movie’s striking visual style allowed Gerwig to pull off this seemingly impossible task. Barbie’s story saw Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie visit the Real World, encounter Mattel executives, and eventually talk Ken out of instilling patriarchy in Barbieland while also healing the relationship between a mother and her daughter. It was funny, clever, open about its hypocritical relationship to consumer culture, and genuinely poignant at times. Despite this, Hollywood’s response to Barbie has been fundamentally incorrect, with the industry taking all the wrong lessons from its success.

Making More Toy Movies Is The Wrong Response To Barbie’s Success

Barbie’s originality was its biggest selling point, something endless copies would lack

The first and most surprising reaction to Barbie’s success came from Mattel, the toy company that owns the rights to the character. Mattel immediately announced a deluge of further toy movies, including an upcoming American Dolls movie, a Polly Pocket movie by Lena Dunham, and a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots movie starring Vin Diesel. While it is not yet clear whether a potential Barbie 2 will be part of the toy company’s takeover of movie theaters, this entire strategy badly misreads the reason behind Barbie’s success. Barbie became a hit because Gerwig’s movie engaged with the toy’s history and cultural impact.

Barbie might not be a radical anti-capitalist text, but Gerwig’s movie does wrestle with the implications of Barbie’s legacy and her place in the world. Barbie interrogates how much the doll’s perfect image has impacted generations of children while questioning how much of that legacy was originally shaped by unfair gendered expectations. None of this is reflected in Mattel hurriedly green-lighting over a dozen projects based on existing toy lines to maximize profits. Instead, the 14 upcoming Mattel toys movies and their competitors merely read as a desperate attempt to cynically cash in on Barbie‘s financial success.

Barbie’s Oscar Nominations Are Baffling

Nominating Gosling over Robbie and Gerwig seems almost obtuse self-parody

It is great to see that Barbie, a mainstream comedy movie, was nominated for Best Picture at the 2024 Oscars. While the Academy isn’t above recognizing comedy, its members rarely reward movies as sunny and unabashedly commercial as Barbie. That said, the fact that Ryan Gosling was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Ken while neither Margot Robbie was nominated for Best Actress nor Greta Gerwig for Best Director is egregious. In a move that mirrors Ken’s in-universe character arc, this decision seemingly reaffirms that Gosling’s supporting work is more deserving of recognition than the labor of the movie’s main creatives.

That said, it should be noted that America Ferrera was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress role, a noteworthy and well-earned nod. Still, the snubs of her fellow women are particularly galling because of how unlikely Barbie is to win in any of its categories. As a mainstream blockbuster that doesn’t wear its angsty side on its sleeve, Barbie will struggle to beat any of its more self-serious contenders. As such, nominations were likely to be as much recognition as Robbie and Gerwig received. Instead, their male colleague was singled out for praise.

Barbie 2 & Ken Spinoff Discussions Miss The Point Of The Movie

Barbie and Ken’s self-contained character arcs would be dulled by sequels and spinoffs

On the subject of Ken, it is understandable that the popularity of Gosling’s character has resulted in discussions of a spinoff. However, Barbie’s potential standalone Ken spinoff movie would undo the movie’s message. Until the finale, both Ken and Barbie only existed in relation to each other and the pair eventually realized that this dynamic was limiting their potential for internal growth. The entire point of Barbie becoming real and Ken choosing his own path was that Barbie and Ken both needed to leave behind their original simplistic personae, but a spinoff or sequel would require them to revisit their old selves.

Even Mattel Doesn’t Get Barbie’s Message

Releasing a Weird Barbie doll proves Mattel didn’t grasp Gerwig’s movie

As if to reaffirm the fact that Mattel missed the point of their own $1.5 billion success story, the company produced a tie-in doll thanks to the popularity of Gerwig’s movie. However, the character that the corporation chose to promote wasn’t the “Ordinary Barbie” proposed by America Ferrara’s Gloria in the movie’s finale. Instead, Mattel released a Weird Barbie doll, a decision that betrays a complete misunderstanding of the movie’s message. What made Weird Barbie compelling and relatable were the ways in which her appearance had been altered by an imaginative child’s playing.

Weird Barbie was recognizable to countless children who contorted their toys in impossible directions, cut their hair, and drew all over them. However, creating countless identical, mass-produced reproductions of Weird Barbie necessarily renders the character less original. In literal terms, a toy that can be replicated hundreds of thousands of times simply is not weird, nor is it unique as Weird Barbie is. This move turned Weird Barbie’s unique oddity into a standardized design, further proving just how much Mattel misread the reasoning behind the movie’s success. Ultimately, Weird Barbie’s appeal can’t be repackaged and sold, which brings up a broader issue with the industry’s reaction to Barbie.

Hollywood Is Embracing Barbie’s Box Office – But Not Its Message

Barbie’s points have been proved all the more valid by the movie’s impact

Hollywood is trying to repeat Barbie’s success with everything from sequels to other toy movies, to tie-in products, to lame attempts at recreating the movie’s box office battle with Oppenheimer. However, the industry isn’t embracing anything about Barbie’s message since the movie’s most salient points fly in the face of many Hollywood maxims. Barbie is, ultimately, a movie designed to promote a product. However, within that framework, Gerwig and Robbie created a project that questions how viewers can find a purpose in life beyond constant consumption and whether a society that doesn’t rely on rigid gender binaries can be achieved.

Barbie’s self-aware script mocked both the company funding the filming and the filmmakers themselves, displaying a refreshing level of cynicism toward the idea of using movies as marketing. The movie engaged thoughtfully with issues like aging, self-image, the pressures that women face, and gender self-recognition while maintaining a broad, campy sense of humor. Instead of recreating this impressive artistic achievement, Mattel has done all it can to squeeze more money from Barbie, the Oscars have elevated its supporting star over its leading creative talents, and the industry more broadly has proven that Gerwig’s movie is viewed only as a profit-producing opportunity, not a creative inspiration.