She’s blonde, bubbly, and can do anything. No wonder this movie was so popular. There were so many memes, posts, and teasers and social media was going wild, it was impossible to avoid! You simply couldn’t miss a trailer, and the suspense built up from all the advertisements was huge. According to this article from Vanity.com, “Barbie,” starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as life-size versions of the popular Mattel dolls, crushed box office expectations with $165 million in

 North America and a stunning $337 million globally.”
The recent Barbie crushed expectations, and to add on from the same article, “this weekend boasted the biggest collective box office turnout of the pandemic era, as well as the fourth-biggest in history.”
The Barbie has been a huge success thanks to the giant marketing budget. It was so successful actually, a nationwide shortage of pink clothing and items has been reported.

Well with expectations being dramatically surpassed and a huge marketing budget, surely the audience loved the movie. According to the Barbie movie section on rottentomatoes.com, the movie has received a 88% on the Tomatometer and a 83% overall audience score.

The top review under the audience section is, “Clever, funny, and poignant, Barbie is an entertaining movie with a great overall message.” Max Weiss, a top critic from Baltimore Magazine says “Mostly, Barbie is laugh-out-loud funny and a sheer delight.” Overall, the reviews for the movie are positive and most loved it. The Barbie movie having such good reviews would leave people who haven’t seen curious, so what is the movie really about?

There’s many messages in the Barbie movie, but the main one is about finding yourself. The plot revolves around Barbie who has to visit the real world to fix an issue, and Ken comes along to Barbie’s surprise. Both Barbie and Ken have to discover themselves throughout the movie. Barbie discovers the world isn’t perfectly fair to women like she thought, and Ken has to find meaning and purpose beyond being “Just Ken” to Barbie. As this article from collider.com puts it “Greta Gerwig’s Barbie weaves influences from other films into a fantastic world of plastic, tackling the theme of forging one’s own identity.”

There is also a prominent theme of feminism. The setting is Barblieland, where everything is ruled by women. It’s supposed to be an exaggerated satire of the a patriarchy. Barbie and Ken have to visit the real world, and when they find out women certainly do not rule the world there, that’s where the plot thickens. Barbie and Ken have to find themselves after realizing how things really are. Barbie is in shock and has an existential crisis over finding out how women are really treated, but Ken is loving the attention of being a hot male! Both later have to find themselves and create their own identity separate from one another.

Citations : https://collider.com/tag/barbie/
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/barbie
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/08/margot-robbie-is-making-a-ton-of-money-from-barbie