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
Did we watch the same movie? One of my main takeaways, and what I thought was so refreshing compared to other more #Girlboss feminist-coded movies like the Ghostbusters reboot, was that simply “letting women run everything” isn’t the answer. Indeed, it’s that setup in the beginning of the movie that creates that bitter resentment in Ken and causes a lot of the ensuing problems. One of the emotional climaxes of the movie is Barbie realizing that she has been mistreating him and that his pain is valid, even if how he’s chosen to handle that pain was poor. The fundamental message I’d gotten was that a true feminism is not just girlbosses running everything, but rather is one that is inclusive of men and seeks to liberate them as well from toxic gender roles and expectations that harm them as well as women.
No, it’s not really a critique of capitalism, but it’s also not remotely trying to be one, and beyond that, the issues it’s talking about aren’t really fundamentally linked to economics. You can have rampant sexism and toxic gender roles in any and all economic systems.