Barbie passed the symbolic $1 billion mark (over €910 million) at the global box office on Sunday, August 6. But the film has not escaped controversy around the world, with censors particularly targeting its feminist themes.
In the United States, the film's country of origin, political reactions are polarized between Republicans and Democrats. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California (where part of the film's action takes place) hailed Barbie, who drives an electric car, as a "champion of climate activism."
On the Republican side, Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), wrote on July 24 on social media that "if you take a shot every time Barbie says the word 'patriarchy,' you will pass out before the movie ends." Conservative polemicist Ben Shapiro, who burned a doll in his video review of the film, sounded a similar note.
In China, Barbie has also provoked defensive reactions from men who accuse it of "fueling conflict between the sexes" and "promoting Western propaganda." The character portrayed on screen by Margot Robbie is gradually becoming a feminist icon, in a country where discussion of such topics is generally censored. But the controversy also turned geopolitical in the region due to the "nine-dash line." Visible on a map in the background of a scene, this line represents Chinese claims in the South China Sea, in particular the Paracel and Spratly islands, disputed by Vietnam and the Philippines. In response, Vietnam has banned the film, while the Philippines demanded that the sequence be blurred before screening.
Although a worldwide success, Barbie has been a flop in South Korea, with just 460,000 tickets sold in two weeks (compared with 3.6 million for the latest Mission: Impossible, released eight days earlier). South Korean feminist activist Haein Shim, quoted in British daily The Guardian, said: "I think Barbie undoubtedly highlights the fact that a women-centered film with feminist humor is still regarded as a taboo subject." South Korea is the OECD country with the widest pay gap between men and women, and President Yoon Suk Yeol has blamed feminism as the cause of the country's low birth rate.
Even before its release in Japan, the film sparked a heated debate in the country due to the summer's other cinematic success: Oppenheimer, by Christopher Nolan, a biopic about the inventor of the nuclear bomb. The hashtag #barbenheimer quickly spread around the world, encouraging people to see both films one after the other. The country frowned upon the trend, as Japan marked on August 6 and 9 the 78th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "It's going to be a summer to remember," the official account for Barbie wrote on social media, only to withdraw the post after Japanese internet users replied that they would "never forget" the summer of 1945.
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