Barbie has officially become the year’s biggest box office hit, after the doll’s big-screen earnings overtook the Super Mario Bros Movie’s total.
The Barbie movie, which sees Margot Robbie’s titular toy swap her pink fantasy home for the real world, has now made $1.38bn (£1.1bn) globally.
That has taken it past the $1.36bn taken by the Super Mario Bros Movie.
Barbie has also helped the US summer box office reach the $4bn (£3.2bn) mark for the first time since the pandemic.
Analysts did not expect cinemas to reach that milestone, but the success of Barbenheimer - Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which were released on the same day in July - propelled takings past last year’s total of $3.4bn (£2.7bn).
Industry experts also predicted that the Super Mario Bros Movie would be the biggest film of 2023. But Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, has proved them wrong on that front too.
The biggest films of 2023 so far
1. Barbie - $1.38bn
2. The Super Mario Bros Movie - $1.36bn
3. Oppenheimer - $853m
4. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 - $846m
5. Fast X - $705m
I suspect it’s tell me either you didn’t watch it or watched it as a male and has above chance probability of being a tech or finance bro (not to dog pile, but I’d bet checking post history here would back that up).
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EDIT: As problematically harsh as I’m being here, the essential point I’m driving at is that superficially dismissing something as “hardly … introspection” when it addresses huge, deep historical prejudices, in however incomplete a way, is itself likely to be, without more depth and context to back the position up, a part of the same deep historical prejudices. If you want to go against the grain of the mainstream critique, I’m all ears, but you gotta do better, and your willingness to casually dismiss smells very strongly of simply and disappointingly coming from a place where the actual “introspection” just doesn’t apply or hold value.
IMO, in the case of the above dismissal, that’s likely enough and problematic enough to warrant some harsh rebuke, and to even delve toward ad hominem comments in order to clarify the biases that may very well be involved.
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Sure it’s not some culture shifting master piece of art and has huge corporate commercial interests behind it. But cultural introspection from the starting point of corporate commercialism is exactly what the film does, where the relevance of starting from a corporate/commercial perspective is that it’s where much of our world starts and is usually anathema to introspection.
For my part, the film earned my respect by actually including and addressing death. It’s fairly radical I’d say to do so in mainstream western media and the film did it evenly and maturely enough, albeit quickly.
Edit: beyond that, from what I’ve gathered, it’s rather impactful for a number of a people, and that can’t really be taken away whatever your critical perspective. Oppenheimer, by contrast, I don’t think had anything impactful to say people didn’t already know (bomb=big bad, maker of bomb = big guilty).