Barbie (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Barbie, Greta Gerwig's 2023 satirical fantasy comedy, drained the entire remaining global supply of a specific shade of pink paint during production. Its supplier, Rosco Laboratories, had been weakened by COVID-19 supply-chain problems and freezing temperatures that damaged their stock. When the film's sets demanded the color, Rosco surrendered every drop. The shade was Pantone 219.

  Gerwig and producer Margot Robbie aimed for a film that was at once a celebration of Barbie and a sustained critique of the doll. Robbie starred as Barbie opposite Ryan Gosling as Ken. Together they travel from Barbieland, a matriarchal utopia, into the real world after an existential crisis disrupts their existence.

  Fourteen years of development across three major studios preceded its arrival as the first live-action Barbie feature after decades of animated titles. How did a project that spent that long in limbo finally escape? And how did a satirical comedy backed by a toy company become the highest-grossing film of 2023?

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• 2. Fourteen Years Circling

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  The concept of a live-action Barbie film had roots at Cannon Films in the mid-1980s. The serious commercial effort began in September 2009, when Mattel announced a partnership with Universal Pictures and producer Laurence Mark. Nothing came from it.

  In April 2014, Mattel teamed with Sony Pictures. Jenny Bicks was hired to write, with Laurie MacDonald and Walter F. Parkes producing through their Parkes+MacDonald Image Nation banner. Filming was expected to begin by year's end.

  In March 2015, Diablo Cody was brought in to rewrite. Sony then ordered separate drafts from Lindsey Beer, Bert V. Royal, and Hillary Winston. In December 2016, Amy Schumer entered negotiations for the title role, co-rewriting with her sister, Kim Caramele. In March 2017, she left. She initially cited scheduling conflicts; in 2023, she revealed that creative differences were the actual reason.

  That July, Anne Hathaway became the leading candidate. Sony hired Olivia Milch to rewrite and approached director Alethea Jones. Jones was attached by March 2018. Sony's option expired in October 2018, and Warner Bros. took the rights. Hathaway, Jones, MacDonald, Parkes, and producer Amy Pascal all departed.

  Robbie Brenner, newly appointed by Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz as head of Mattel Films, partnered with Margot Robbie's production company, LuckyChap Entertainment. Kreiz was determined to cast Robbie after meeting her. He felt her appearance resembled a conventional Barbie doll and was impressed by her ideas. Their initial meetings took place at the Polo Lounge in The Beverly Hills Hotel.

  Gal Gadot had been in consideration for the title role but declined due to scheduling conflicts. Robbie's casting was confirmed in July 2019. In the Warner Bros. green-light meeting, she compared the film to Jurassic Park (1993) and jokingly predicted it would gross over $1 billion.

  Gerwig, whose Little Women (2019) Robbie admired, agreed to write the screenplay on one condition: her husband, Noah Baumbach, would co-write. She signed on to also direct in July 2021. Ben Affleck had been set to cameo in the beach fight sequence. Scheduling conflicts with Air (2023) prevented his appearance, and the role was rewritten for Michael Cera.

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• 3. A Poem About a Doll

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  Gerwig and Baumbach wrote the screenplay during the 2020-2021 pandemic lockdowns at their house in Long Island. Warner Bros. gave them full creative freedom. Gerwig's initial film treatment was an abstract poem influenced by the Apostles' Creed.

  Baumbach described understanding the film's purpose only after Gerwig showed him the opening scene. He identified the central element as "embracing mortality and sadness and sickness and everything that it means to be human."

  Ruth Handler, the real-life creator of the Barbie doll, also informed Gerwig's thinking. So did Reviving Ophelia, a 1994 non-fiction book by Mary Pipher that examines societal pressures on American teenage girls. Classic Technicolor musicals shaped the film's aesthetic ambition, particularly The Red Shoes (1948) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Gerwig described what she admired in those films as "authentic artificiality." A painted sky in a soundstage is an illusion; the painted backdrop is tangibly, genuinely there.

  The script contained candid criticism of Mattel, creating skepticism among company officials when they first read it. CEO Kreiz ultimately chose to trust Gerwig. Brenner noted that "being safe in this world doesn't work." Will Ferrell's role as the Mattel CEO was written as an allegory for corporate America.

  Gerwig described her core aim as "doing the thing and subverting the thing." She wanted to celebrate the feminism she saw in Barbie while honestly examining the doll's problematic beauty standards. She was also captivated by the idea that humans create dolls that in turn imitate humans, sensing that "we're in constant conversation with inanimate objects."

  She drew on John Milton's Paradise Lost, particularly the idea that "there is no poetry without pain." Ken's arc, centered on a power ballad, was the moment Gerwig felt the project had surpassed what a conventional Barbie film would have been.

  She chose to preserve one scene despite pressure to remove it: Robbie's Barbie telling an older woman that she is beautiful. Gerwig called it "the heart of the movie."

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• 4. The Pink World Made Real

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  Principal photography began on the 22nd of March 2022, at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden in England, and wrapped on July 21. A key exterior location was the Venice Beach Skatepark in Los Angeles. Rodrigo Prieto served as cinematographer.

  Set designer Sarah Greenwood and decorator Katie Spencer led the physical construction of Barbieland. For the Dreamhouse, they drew from mid-century modernist architecture in Palm Springs. Specific references included the 1946 Kaufmann Desert House by Richard Neutra and the photography of Slim Aarons.

  Gerwig wanted the sets to feel tactile. Her reasoning: "toys are, above all, things you touch." She chose practical effects over CGI to capture the sky and the San Jacinto Mountains. She also called director Peter Weir for guidance on building Barbieland as what she described as "an interior soundstage world."

  Costume designer Jacqueline Durran created Barbieland wardrobes in roughly fifteen color combinations evoking "a French Riviera beach in the early 1960s." She drew inspiration from actress Brigitte Bardot. For Ken, Durran focused on colorful sportswear from the 1980s. Ryan Gosling himself suggested a Ken-branded underwear for the character.

  Durran adapted outfits from past Barbie doll iterations, including the 1993 Western Stampin dolls and the 1994 Hot Skatin dolls. Some pieces came from Chanel's fashion archives. Ivana Primorac served as lead hair and makeup artist. In 2024, Primorac and colleagues Marie Larkin and Clare Corsick won the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild Award. The prize recognized Best Period and/or Character Hair Styling in a Feature-Length Motion Picture.

  The visual effects team built a color-correcting software called PPL, which separated images into blue, green, and red components for individual manipulation. The resulting Barbieland palette was named TechnoBarbie, drawn from the look of classic three-strip Technicolor.

  Gerwig organized a sleepover with the female cast before filming began, aiming to build genuine chemistry within the ensemble. She used filming techniques from the 1950s to create a period-accurate look. Nick Huoy, who had edited both Lady Bird and Little Women for Gerwig, returned to cut the film alongside VFX supervisor Glen Pratt.

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• 5. What Was I Made For?

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  Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt scored the film. As the film was being edited, Ronson and Gerwig showed selected scenes to artists they hoped to feature on the companion album. The Barbie the Album soundtrack was released on the 21st of July 2023, the same day as the film itself.

  The album featured Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, Billie Eilish, Tame Impala, and Sam Smith, among others. Cast member Ryan Gosling also contributed a track. "Dance the Night" by Dua Lipa served as the lead single, released on the 26th of May 2023. "What Was I Made For?" by Billie Eilish followed on July 13.

  "What Was I Made For?" won Best Original Song at the Academy Awards and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song at the 81st ceremony. The film's soundtrack and score received twelve nominations at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards.

  Despite strong fan expectations, the 1997 Aqua song "Barbie Girl" was not included. Ulrich Moller-Jorgensen, manager for Aqua lead singer Lene Nystrom, confirmed its absence. Variety speculated the reason was a series of lawsuits between Mattel and MCA Records, the song's American publisher, that ran from 1997 to 2002.

  In place of the original, the film used "Barbie World" by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice, which samples "Barbie Girl." Aqua is credited as a performer and co-writer on the track. The 1989 Indigo Girls song "Closer to Fine" and the 1997 Matchbox Twenty song "Push" also recur throughout the film. In Barbieland, Ken adopts "Push" as a tongue-in-cheek anthem of patriarchal dominance after hearing it in the real world. Gerwig said she was a genuine Matchbox Twenty fan and that "I never put anything in a movie I don't love."

  "Spice Up Your Life" by the Spice Girls plays in a flashback showing a little girl's rough play gradually transforming a Barbie into the disfigured character known as Weird Barbie.

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• 6. The Barbenheimer Surge

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  Barbie was released in the United States on the 21st of July 2023, the same day as Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's biographical film about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The tonal contrast between the two productions inspired audiences to treat them as a double feature. Social media users named the phenomenon "Barbenheimer."

  Cillian Murphy, the star of Oppenheimer, endorsed the idea in an interview with La Vanguardia: "My advice would be for people to go see both, on the same day. If they are good films, then that's cinema's gain." A combined 79% of opening-weekend tickets were for the two films. Barbie accounted for 52% of that figure. A total of 18.5 million people saw the pair together.

  Barbie opened to $162 million in its first weekend in the United States and Canada. That was the largest debut since Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which had opened to $181.3 million in November 2022. It was also the biggest opening weekend ever for a film directed by a woman, besting Captain Marvel (2019). It surpassed Suicide Squad (2016) for Robbie's highest opening weekend and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) for Gosling's.

  The film crossed $1 billion worldwide on the 6th of August 2023, becoming the only film by a solo female director to reach that mark. It was also the fastest Warner Bros. film to cross $1 billion, surpassing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 (2011). In Ireland, Barbie became the highest-grossing film in the country's history with $9.57 million, surpassing Avatar (2009).

  Barbie underperformed in South Korea. Between July 28 and 30, 2023, the film recorded roughly 81,000 admissions and finished fifth at the domestic box office. Critics in the country attributed the result to cultural distance from Barbie's American context and an unfriendly reception to the film's feminist themes.

  In Japan, the film ranked sixteenth. Prior to its Japanese release, the official Barbie social media account had responded positively to Barbenheimer memes featuring atomic bomb imagery. The backlash in Japan was significant. Mitsuki Takahata voiced Barbie in the Japanese dub. She wrote on Instagram that she was disappointed and had considered withdrawing from promotional events.

  The film returned to theaters in an IMAX format on the 22nd of September 2023, for one week. The IMAX edition included a new post-credits scene and an onscreen introduction by Gerwig.

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• 7. Bans and Disputed Lines

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  On the 3rd of July 2023, Vietnam's film authority announced that Barbie was banned for allegedly displaying the nine-dash line. This is China's contested territorial claim over much of the South China Sea. Vietnamese newspaper Tuoi Tre quoted the head of the Department of Cinema making the announcement. The film had been scheduled to open in Vietnam on July 21.

  The nine-dash line sits at the center of active maritime disputes involving China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Both Vietnam and the Philippines had previously banned Abominable (2019) and Uncharted (2022) for including the actual nine-dash line.

  Warner Bros. responded on July 6 with a statement calling the map in question "a child-like crayon drawing." The studio explained that its dashed lines depicted Barbie's journey from Barbieland to the real world, not any territorial boundary.

  The Philippines' Movie and Television Review and Classification Board found "no basis" for a ban. The board called the map "cartoonish" and found no clear depiction of the nine-dash line. The film received a PG rating and was released in the Philippines on July 19, though the board asked Warner Bros. to blur the relevant lines.

  In Pakistan, the film opened nationwide on July 21. The following day, Punjab province's caretaker Minister of Information and Culture Amir Mir ordered a halt to screenings, alleging the film showed homosexuality. Final approval for provincial screenings was granted on August 1.

  Kuwait formally banned Barbie on the 9th of August 2023. The head of the Kuwaiti authority, Lafi Al-Subaie, accused the film of "carrying ideas that encourage unacceptable behavior and distort society's values." Lebanon's Hezbollah-backed Minister of Culture proposed a ban the same day for alleged promotion of homosexuality. A Lebanese review authority found no grounds for a ban, and the film was approved for audiences aged 13 and above on September 1. It opened in Lebanese theaters on September 7.

  Algeria halted screenings on August 13. That was three weeks after its July 19 release there. An official source stated it "promotes homosexuality and other Western deviances."

  A French promotional poster went viral for a double meaning in its tagline. The line "Elle peut tout faire. Lui, c'est juste Ken" translates as "She can do everything. He's just Ken." In verlan slang, the phrase could also carry a sexual reading. Warner Bros. would neither confirm nor deny that the pun was intentional.

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• 8. Reading Barbie

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  Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale. Those polled by PostTrak gave it an 89% overall positive score, with 79% saying they would definitely recommend it.

  Wiebke Deimling, a professor of philosophy at Clark University, compared a key scene in the film to the experience machine. That thought experiment was devised by the philosopher Robert Nozick. The scene has Barbie choosing between returning to her perfect life in Barbieland or learning the truth about her existence. Chinese film critic Li Jingfei compared Barbie's sudden awareness of death to a pivotal moment in Buddhist tradition. That is the moment when Siddhartha Gautama first encountered suffering after leaving the palace of his birth.

  Alissa Wilkinson of Vox compared Barbieland to the biblical Garden of Eden, with Barbie and Ken as inverted parallels of Adam and Eve. She read the moment when Barbie becomes aware of being looked at in the real world as the film's version of the Fall.

  Katie Pickles of The Conversation argued that the film shows how matriarchy can be "as bad" as the patriarchy. In Barbieland, the Kens occupy the objectified and excluded role. Jack Butler of National Review called it a "post-feminist satire" rather than a man-hating film. He noted that Ken's attempt to install patriarchy in Barbieland collapses almost immediately. Ross Douthat of The New York Times described the film as having "a feminist default." He also noted its "complicated and sometimes muddled feelings about what the sexual revolution has done."

  Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times paired the film with Taylor Swift's concurrent Eras Tour. She called both the "biggest cultural phenomena of 2023 summer." She noted that beneath their commercial surfaces, "they tell female coming-of-age stories marked by existential crises and bitter confrontations with sexism."

  Barbie received eight nominations at the 96th Academy Awards. Among them were Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Ryan Gosling, and Best Supporting Actress for America Ferrera. It tied with Cabaret (1972) for the second-most nominations in Golden Globe Awards history, earning nine nominations at the 81st ceremony. The National Board of Review and the American Film Institute each named it one of the top ten films of 2023.

  Variety reported in August 2023 that Robbie would earn "roughly $50 million in salary and box office bonuses" as the film's star and producer.

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