Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Shatters Records While Provoking Debate

In the entire history of the film industry, the top-grossing worldwide hit movie of each year had always been directed or co-directed by men. History has now been changed. In 2023, the comedy film Barbie — directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie — shattered this glass ceiling by becoming the first movie solely directed by a woman to become the biggest hit movie of this year. Barbie broke many box-office records along the way, including becoming the highest-grossing movie ever directed solely by a woman. In addition, Barbie has sparked considerable cultural debates about patriarchy, feminism, consumerism, and more.

Released worldwide in July by Warner Bros. Pictures, and made in cooperation with Barbie toy company Mattel, Barbie quickly entered the elite “billion-dollar” club of movies that have had worldwide ticket sales of more than $1 billion. As of this writing, only 53 movies have achieved this milestone. Barbie made $162 million in the U.S. in its opening weekend, which is the highest opening-weekend number in the U.S. for a movie directed by a woman. As of this writing, Barbie has sold about $1.4 billion in tickets worldwide, including about $621 million in the United States. Not only is Barbie the highest-grossing blockbuster movie of 2023 worldwide and in the U.S. (surpassing Universal Pictures’ animated film The Super Mario Bros. Movie), but it is also the biggest hit film of all time for Warner Bros. Pictures. The previous Warner Bros. Pictures box-office champ was 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, which had worldwide ticket sales of $1.3 billion and was the No 1 movie of 2011.

Disney’s 2013 animated film Frozen, which was the world’s biggest movie that year, was co-directed by a woman (Jennifer Lee) and a man (Chris Buck), but Barbie is a bigger hit than Frozen. The worldwide box-office numbers for Frozen reached $1.3 billion. Barbie could sail past Disney’s 2019 sequel Frozen II (also co-directed by Lee and Buck), which had worldwide ticket sales of $1.45 billion and was the No. 3 movie worldwide of 2019. Simply put: Barbie has become a major milestone achievement on several levels for female directors.

Along with the massive box-office figures for Barbie have come outpourings of commentaries and analyses about the film. Gerwig says she intended the movie to get big reactions from people. “I wanted to make something anarchic and wild and funny and cathartic, and the idea that it’s actually being received that way, it’s sort of extraordinary,” Gerwig commented to The New York Times in July, after the Barbie movie was released. “I think it was a particular ripple in the universe that allowed it to happen.” Barbie is also one of those rare movies where many people dress a certain way just to see the movie. The Internet is filled with images of people wearing pink (Barbie’s signature color), as they go to cinemas to see the movie.

Gerwig co-wrote the Barbie screenplay with Noah Baumbach, her life partner and her frequent collaborator in filmmaking. In the movie, several diverse characters are named Barbie and Ken and portray life-sized versions of these dolls. The main Barbie character is played by Robbie (who’s also one of the film’s producers), while the main Ken character is played by Ryan Gosling. The Barbies and Kens live in the matriarchal world of Barbie Land, where the female characters have most of the power and live in harmony with the male characters. Robbie’s Barbie (“Stereotypical Barbie”) starts to have dark thoughts about dying and experiences some malfunctions, so she’s advised by a social outcast named Weird Barbie (played by Kate McKinnon) to go to Mattel’s Los Angeles-area headquarters in the “real world” to find out what is threatening Barbie’s “perfect” existence. Ken tags along for the ride.

In the “real world,” Ken discovers what it feels like to live in a patriarchal society where men have most of the power. Ken and Barbie cross paths with Mattel’s bumbling and pompous CEO (played by Will Ferrell), who wants to put Barbie and Ken back in their doll boxes. Meanwhile, another Mattel employee named Gloria (played by America Ferrera) and her Barbie-doll-hating adolescent daughter Sasha (played Arianna Greenblatt) end up playing important roles in the story. In one of the movie’s most talked-about scenes, Gloria has a memorable monologue where she candidly shares her feelings about the double standards and discrimination that women and girls experience in life.

Gerwig, who is an outspoken feminist, told The New York Times that it was crucial for her Barbie movie to reflect the many aspects of how people can feel about Barbie dolls. She had Barbie dolls as toys in her childhood, but “I grew up with a mom who was kind of against Barbie, so that’s how I knew all that. If you don’t give voice to that, then you’re nowheresville.” Much of Barbie’s comedy derives from a satirical treatment of men having patriarchal privilege and the ways that misogyny is ingrained in many parts of society. The movie also includes some commentary on the concept of a “beta male” (embodied by a doll named Allan, played by Michael Cera), who is often the target of a toxic mentality that treats “beta males” as inferior to other males.

The Barbie movie invites audiences to see what a world would look like if women had most of the power or if society were closer to gender equality. In Barbie Land, President Barbie is played by Issa Rae. The diverse range of Barbies and Kens include those of various races and body sizes, as well as a medical doctor Barbie portrayed by transgender actress Hari Nef. Barbie also acknowledges that Barbie dolls have been beloved and loathed for influencing people’s perceptions of femininity, ever since the first Barbie doll was created by Ruth Handler (as a tribute to her daughter Barbara) and sold to the masses in 1959.

The film’s skewering of male supremacy clearly touched a nerve among some conservatives, garnering accusations of being man-hating, “woke,” and antifamily and even provoking calls for a boycott. At the same time, the Barbie movie has garnered vitriol from feminist and more liberal observers, such as historian/feminist Jill Lepore and Ann Manov, a film critic at the British progressive publication The New Statesman.

Although the majority of film critics have given positive reviews to Barbie, some critics have knocked the film for not giving enough critical scrutiny of racism and capitalism. And even though Barbie has been a hit in most countries where it has been released, it’s been a flop or has been banned in some countries. Based on box-office numbers, the film failed to impress moviegoing audiences in South Korea and in China, possibly because Barbie dolls are not very popular in those countries. The movie has been banned in Algeria, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Vietnam, for cultural and political reasons.

Gerwig commented to The New York Times about the backlash against the Barbie movie: “Certainly, there’s a lot of passion. My hope for the movie is that it’s an invitation for everybody to be part of the party and let go of the things that aren’t necessarily serving us as either women or men. I hope that in all of that passion, if they see it or engage with it, it can give them some of the relief that it gave other people.”

Barbie is also an example of how more actresses are taking control of their projects by being producers for those projects. Robbie, who is originally from Australia and produced Barbie through her company, LuckyChap Entertainment, is the only woman on the team of four producers who would get Oscar nominations if Barbie is nominated for Best Picture at the 2024 Academy Awards. (Robbie’s husband, Tom Ackerley, is one of the other Barbie producers.)

Robbie told Time magazine that she would not have wanted to be involved in the movie if it didn’t have the diversity of Barbies that Mattel has introduced in recent decades: “If [Mattel] hadn’t made that change to have a multiplicity of Barbies, I don’t think I would have wanted to attempt to make a Barbie film. I don’t think you should say, ‘This is the one version of what Barbie is, and that’s what women should aspire to be and look like and act like.’” Robbie said the satire in the Barbie movie is an indication that “we’re in on the joke. This isn’t a Barbie puff piece.”

Regarding criticism that a movie like Barbie exists just to sell more merchandise for a corporation such as Mattel, Gerwig commented to Time that “sometimes these movies can have a quality of hegemonic capitalism.” However, Gerwig also told The New York Times that Mattel gave her a lot of leeway in how the movie skewers Mattel’s corporate image and in acknowledging how Barbie can be a divisive figure. Gerwig said, “It wasn’t like I ever got the full seal of approval from [Mattel], like, ‘We love it!’ I got a tentative, “Well, OK. I see that you are going to do this, so go ahead and we’ll see how it goes.”

Barbie is Gerwig’s fourth movie as a director, having made her feature-film directorial debut with the 2008 low-budget romantic drama Nights and Weekends, which she co-directed and co-wrote with Joe Swanberg. Gerwig is one of the small number of women who have received an Oscar nomination for Best Director. She was nominated for Best Director for the second movie she directed: the 2017 comedy/drama Lady Bird, starring Saoirse Ronan as a California teenager who yearns to go to college on the East Coast. Gerwig’s third movie as a director is the 2019 remake of Little Women, which won an Oscar for Best Costume Design for Jacqueline Durran, who is also the costume designer for Barbie. Sarah Greenwood is the production designer for Barbie. Warner Bros. Pictures is riding the Barbie momentum by releasing the movie in IMAX in North America, beginning September 22. These IMAX screenings will include a “special greeting” from Gerwig that will be shown before the movie, as well as “exclusive post-credit footage, selected by Gerwig,” according to a Warner Bros. Pictures press release.

The groundbreaking success of Barbie will be dissected and debated for years to come. And that in itself is notable. Love it or hate it, Barbie has provoked thought and debate; the kinds of serious cultural analyses that this film has inspired are very unusual for a film of this nature.

National Public Radio film critic Aisha Harris succinctly observed in her Barbie review: “It’s a movie that sits at an interesting inflection point in moviemaking and movie consumption, when almost every idea seems born from a pre-existing product. While it’s easy to balk at … the truth is, the tension between filmmaking and commerce has and always will be present in the work itself. ... Something like Barbie lays that tension bare and exposed in its unabashed commercialism and heightened sensibilities, so that you can’t not think about how its aims may be at odds with its execution. But that’s also part of what makes it such an interesting oddity to witness. It’s a Barbie world you’ll be more than happy to have visited, even as it confounds.”