Barbie Movie Grosses More Than $1 Billion At Box Office

From CNN: 

    ... Barely three weeks into its run, writer-director Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster has raked in an astounding $1.03 billion at the global box office, according to official Warner Bros. estimates. This makes Gerwig the first solo female director with a billion-dollar movie.

    As one half of the viral “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, it isn’t shocking “Barbie” has performed well. And, standing on her own two feet, the doll’s incredible success is not unexpected at all.

    “I’ve been in this game for 30 years and the Barbie and Barbenheimer phenomenon is as unprecedented as it was unpredictable,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.

    According to Dergarabedian, only about 50 films in history, unadjusted for inflation, have hit the billion-dollar mark.

    He added the movie’s marketing campaign was the first hint “Barbie” would be a box office smash. “The marketing campaign for ‘Barbie’ set into motion a chain of events that led to the word ‘Barbenheimer’ being added to the popular lexicon by virtue of its shared release date with ‘Oppenheimer,’ and that’s when we all knew something very special and unique was going to create a much bigger than expected outcome for the film not only for the opening weekend, but for its global run in theaters.”

While disappointed, I'm not surprised. First, the film appealed to those who enjoyed Barbie dolls and products: videos, video games, coloring books, books, and more. Second, it also appealed to the feminist market, which is not just women but their male enablers. 

    And then there are the numerous husbands and sons dragged to the movie by the crones in their lives. For instance, Wendy Besel Hahn, writing at the HuffPost, bragged: "I Took My 15-Year-Old Son To See 'Barbie' Because I'm Worried He Could Become Ken." The rest of her piece describes how she mentally abused her son by making him feel guilty for being a white male. For instance, she states:

As his 51-year-old mother, I’m painfully aware that my son is merely six years away from having more rights in America than I do. He will soon obtain a driver’s license, and later get a voter’s registration. Due to the generosity of his grandparents and our ability to save money, he has a modest college fund. Once he reaches the age when he can legally consume alcohol and has a college degree, he might arrive on a relatively level playing field with Gosling (minus the fame and the eight-pack abs). 

I frankly was surprised that a 51-year old woman didn't have a driver's license and hadn't registered to vote and believed she couldn't legally drink alcohol. She has a college degree, so I don't know that was all about. But then she adds:

He will have bodily autonomy — a privilege I lost in June 2022 when six Supreme Court justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

 As if, at 51, she was going to get pregnant. Of course, she doesn't mention that her son will also soon be eligible for the draft and all that implies for his lack of bodily autonomy. But she is so obsessed with herself and her imagined victimhood that I doubt she thinks much about her son. 

    You can see this from the following passage:

I’ve been inoculating my son against hate for years. On the morning of Nov. 9, 2016 [when Trump won the presidential election], my then 8-year-old son found me sobbing on our family room couch in a suburb outside Washington, D.C. [Coo-coo!] Right then and there, I gave him a gargantuan task that amounted to “don’t sit by and let people bully others.” I implored him to use his privilege to help. It was a huge ask and perhaps an inappropriate burden for a kid that age, but I’d already put some scaffold in place. 

After some virtue signaling, she continues:

    Movies, like books, invite dialogue. As a former high school English teacher, I wish all teachers would assign their students to watch “Barbie” in place of summer reading selections like “The Grapes of Wrath.” Since it’s too late to amend summer assignments, I’ll encourage all my friends and acquaintances to see the movie with their teenagers.

    Analyzing the “Barbie” film is as foreign to my son as reading Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was last year in ninth grade. It requires a guide who can explain that Ken’s inferior position in Barbieland is a mere inversion of the patriarchal American society we live in today. I was thrilled to be given the chance to provide that guidance.

Because Hahn has suffered so much from the patriarchy: 

After earning an MFA from George Mason University, she attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a nonfiction contributor in 2016. She has also served as a panelist at Fall for the Book and Gaithersburg Book Festival. She is the nonfiction editor for Furious Gravity: Vol. IX in Grace and Gravity Series, founded by Richard Peabody and edited by Melissa Scholes Young. Her work appears in The Washington Post, Scary Mommy, Redivider, Sojourners, and elsewhere.