Hacker Cinema
Barbie
2023 · Film · 114 min
Directed by Greta Gerwig
Barbie and Ken are having the time of their lives in the colorful and seemingly perfect world of Barbie Land. However, when they get a chance to go to the real world, they soon discover the joys and perils of living among humans.
20 positive16 negative5 mixed94 neutralfrom 135 commenters
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142 comments on Hacker News
I don't even think I'd have the right to tear down anyone's list -- I actually think that even if an 22-year-old replied with a list of ten movies from 2016-2025 that he went to the cinema to see, and which he would be happy to recommend, that'd be enough for me!
I brought up this list: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/essential-2000s-movies/ and scrolled through, and I think I saw at least half these movies either in the theater or as rentals, and most of the ones I saw I loved. Furthermore, I think at least a third are major contributors to the American cultural canon, both as being in the zeitgeist in the season of their initial release as well as being remembered going forward. For instance, people still today make references to "Mean Girls" or "The Dark Knight" or "Minority Report" that only fully make sense if you've seen those films or at least know they exist and their premises. And I think it would be pretty easy to make a list of 50-75 significant movies each from the 80s and 90s, but I'm focusing on ones during my adulthood to follow the spirit of your ask.
This is what I can't imagine finding ten of in the past decade. I'd be tempted to put "Barbie" on that list potentially, given how many memes I've seen using frames from it. Also, honestly, several Pixar films deserve to be on the list too, though I admit that I'm biased because they're some of the few that I've seen.
I'm talking about the best of the best though, the top of the form at the time. Yes those are classics and for good reason. But there were also lots more. Lucas, Kubrick, Spielberg, Lynch...feels like they just don't make 'em like that anymore. It's crazy that in some ways nothing has really eclipsed a movie from 1977 and we're still awash in its glow.
I tried to provide specific examples and contrast with something in the current zeitgest. I'm open to counter-arguments. I liked Barbie and Oppenheimer, both were well-done, but I don't think they'll stand up with the greats. I admit that I don't watch as many movies now but what stands out in the past 10 years?
I have a LG WP50NB40 but it might be scarce these days. I wanted an external drive. Took about five mins to flash. I've ripped a few recent UHD blurays like the Barbie movie and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness without issues.
> In the scifi-whodunnit The Barbie Murders the concept of changing your body without too much trouble is used by a cult of people who all look exactly the same — lack of genitalia (i.e., 'Barbie'-like) included.
Did you see the Barbie movie? I bet you will enjoy it.
There is a scene where Ken and Barbie are rollerblading in Venice Beach, and some rude people are harassing them. They each announce, "I don't have a ..." (You can fill in the blank.)
And without giving too much away, there is another scene near the end that involves... Birkenstocks!
Are you suggesting it's not noticeable in those movies? I found it distracting several times in I think every one of those (maybe the least in 1917? And I haven't seen Ford vs. Ferrari, but I have all the rest). A few entire scenes or sequences in TG:M look awful, and it's usually the mundane ones that wouldn't even have been effects in a pre-CG movie, not the aircraft action stuff. Alien: Romulus looks fake practically the whole movie (that one didn't ruin it for me or anything, but it had an effect like the Riddick movies, of being obviously mostly a cartoon, though of course not as awful about it as those were).
Well, I guess it wasn't exactly distracting in Barbie because that's practically a marionette movie a la Thunderbirds, so it's not really trying not to look off.
Where's the demographic data in this piece? Moviegoing isn't the 'same' but it seems like there's a segment of the 'younger generation' that gravitates towards the 'event' aspect of some bigger draws. Taylor Swift movie? Barbie? Minecraft? etc
And what is 'older generations'? Maybe that's not the elder millenial-Gen X portion of the market, but maybe 65+ have a lot of time on their hands to go see Oppenheimer etc. Top Gun? Just some off the top of my head that seemed to have an impact culturally and box office-wise.
There's something to be said about the quality of films and/or the role of the blockbuster level ones. Maybe the result is only the mega films are what the cinema is for in the end.
Meanwhile just last month Zootopia 2 set single-day record for a Hollywood open in China.
Myself during the pandemic I was really turned off by the idea they were going to keep doing concessions the way they usually did because the idea of a popcorn and coke mess would turn my stomach.
Since then I've seen Barbie and Superman and it was cool but I'm not in a rush to see more movies in a theater. We were worried that the chain theater in town was going to go out of business because it had been leveraged by an Israeli company just before the crisis. The art house theater downtown is starting to show those tentpole movies but the art house movies in the trailers seem all the same to me and don't catch my eye. If they wanted to get me in they should have shown Ne Zha 2. The big chain theater is actually getting interesting because they show all kinds of unusual thing such as live opera performances, anime movies, etc.
Just can't see it beating streaming though, also I think somehow television has outpaced movies in terms of the scope of stories it can tell. I find it so boring that they keep making three-packs of superhero movies and then reboot and tell the origin story over and over again, one thing I liked about the latest Superman was that they didn't retell his journey from Krypton and his upbringing in farm country but just jumped into it -- I mean, Superman has been around 87 years we know his origin story.
In a TV show they couldn't get away with rehashing the origin story and the first few books over and over again -- I could care less if Spiderman was bit by a radioactive spider or a GMO spider, I just want to seem him slinging webs and punching bad guys and mostly being loved by the community and occasionally feared.
moviegoing has always been evolving. from kinetoscopes to grand movie palaces to suburban multiplexes. nothing has ever stayed the same for long in cinema.
heck, most theaters used to be continuous program viewing, meaning you’d show up not knowing what was playing, halfway through a movie, cartoon, or newsreel. scheduled viewing was pretty rare until the early 60s, only reserved for tentpole movies like Gone With The Wind or Ben-Hur.
in some ways, where we are heading is back to where we were: tentpole cultural moments like Barbie or Avatar thrive, but the bread and butter of entertainment happens informally, but now at home.
A few recent Warner Bros films / coproductions
Imagine if these had not had theatrical releases, or, had only had 1 week limited releases just to qualify for awards..
Tenet
Dune
The Batman
Barbie
Furiosa
Twisters
Minecraft
Sinners
Superman
Weapons
One Battle After Another
Not directly related to streaming services, but this happened: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2025/08/13/noisy-le-sec-annule-la-diffusion-du-film-barbie-apres-des-pressions-d-habitants_6629053_3224.html
I can definitely see how streaming services would adapt to bigots.
Ive noticed that some of these types tend to be well meaning young people (often girls) who are super excited to have scored a job doing developer outreach for $BIGTECH.
It's a clever political tactic coz a 50 year old white male middle manager at Microsoft trying to become a board member on an open source foundation would face a lot more hostility than a 20-something girl who pushes all of the diversity buttons.
It mirrors the rather successful marketing strategies for a string of movies including Ghostbusters movie and Barbie, among others. i.e. "There's a certain kind of person who doesnt like our latest corporate offering...". Who wants to be that person?
Back in the pandemic I remember movie theaters being in a real hurry to get the food concessions running again.
I don't think I've ever been one to get disgusted quickly and I might even like insects and germs better than people, but when things were re-opening my sense of cleanliness was reset and the thought of dealing with a popcorn and Coke mess was just unbearable to me.
Since then I've only been out for Barbie and Join or Die, the latter because the showing was sponsored by my employer and some of my coworkers showed up in it.
> The article you link even begins: "So many TV shows and movies now"
and from this you somehow deduce "hose "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama."
Where "certain type of drama" is anything from procedurals to action, from drama to fantasy.
> It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
Where the article uses the following "certain type of drama" examples: Justice League, Dexter. Definitely they both fall into the category of "the same type of drama".
> You're not seeing it in comedies.
As in: modern comedies are washed out and desaturated more often than not. For every Barbie there's a dozen Red Notices
Nah it’s just that Zuck watched the Barbie movie and realized Soace Karen was getting entirely too much limelight and declared a Year of Masculinity
Depends, wokespotting is a complex sport, and I only trust professionals to do it.
I tried myself, but failed. At first I thought it meant the movie was either feminist, antiracist and/or Marxist, but it then became clear it was actually an union of unpopular and one of the three criteria (see no time to die, or guardian 3 that are suddenly not woke). So from this, Star Trek, despite being the most Marxist utopia ever, isn't woke, since it's popular.
But Barbie is quite popular and still woke. But Alien is not despite featuring the biggest Mary Sue. Like I said, to complex for me, I leave wokespotting to professionals.
> Your only market was selling to other masculine-identifying customers, if you didn't in some way pander to male obsessions then you'd usually struggle to find a market.
You are wrong on all levels with this statement.
Firstly, males are ~50% of the world population, that's a hell of a large market to sell to. And secondly, you can also make separate games specifically for girls as the target market to get the other ~50%, you don't have to feminize or water down traditionally male games/franchises hoping they'll appeal to women because it never works like that.
Top Gun Maverick was a hit because it was mostly geared towards male fantasies and that's fine. The Barbie movie was a hit because it was movie targeted specifically to women and that's fine. Imagine they'd make the Barbie movie all about Ken in order to appeal to men as well. Who would watch that? Nobody. Well, that's exactly what modern game dev, story telling and writing is doing today, and then wondering why it's failing. Trying to make an entertainment product to appeal to absolutely everyone is doomed to fail from the start.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with having entertainment made specifically for one gender or the other, because they're biologically different and therefore have different fantasies, and gaming is a lot about living personal fantasies and escapism from reality, not about having narratives you don't empathize with, shoved down your throat.
>Along with the advent of smartphones, "casual" gaming became the norm and less masculine obsessive titles got funded. For the first time perhaps in the history of gaming, you can make more money targeting a more inclusive audience from the start.
And that's good, but that's because of creation of new gaming genres like Farmville, Candy Crush or Flappy bird, that have mass appeal, not by modifying established "male dominated" franchises to give them mass appeal.
>I empathize with that perspective
You may empathize with it but you clearly don't understand it nor does a large part of the modern industry it seems. Or they understand it but reject it because in their mind women >= men at everything, therefore they must be forced to enjoy the same entertainment. Refusing to acknowledge that men and women are different and into different things (aka "wokification") is what's killing modern entertainment.
>Unless your game is so blatantly offensive that it crosses into parody again (eg. Wolvenstein or C&C Red Alert)
What was blatantly offensive about such games?
>you can't really make a non-woke game nowadays without looking like a moron
Yeah you can. Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, Black Myth Wukong, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, etc
To be fair, the article starts out seeming real for about the first third. It's only after the first list — Barbie, Damini, Sita,... Azhar, It — that it descends into obvious parody. Quote:
"What's interesting about the (Fiction) list here is that it's pretty international: only two of the top ten movies come from Hollywood, 6 are from India, one from Indonesia and one from Turkey. So it's definitely an international phenomenon."
Here the writer slides seamlessly from talking about movies with title drops to talking about movies with single-word titles which are also the name of the main character, but is still saying things like "What's interesting about this list..." and "...an international phenomenon," as if those are remotely the defining characteristics of the list he just gave. (The defining characteristic, again, is "movies named after the protagonist." That's all.)
Then there's a section break. Since the article clearly outed itself as parody right before the break, I think it's totally reasonable for anyone to stop reading it at that point. (Although maybe not 100% reasonable to come back and comment on HN about it, except maybe to express disappointment and save other people the bother of reading that far themselves.)
Anyway, after the break the author says, "You might have noticed [an icon on each movie that is] named after one of its characters." But scroll back up and you'll see that icon is missing from 4 of the movies in that list of 10: "Saina", "Nussa", "Arif v. 216", and "It". Of those 4, 3 are clearly named after a main character. The fourth (like "Ecks vs. Sever") is named after two characters (Arif and 216) but the graph shows that the author is counting instances of the name "Arif" alone, not instances of the phrase "Arif v 216".
So not only is the article trying to be funny, it's not even playing by consistent rules — it's a parody of an academic paper but also just flat-out lying about the data! That's not only annoying but uncool.
I would actually be interested in reading a real article on the phenomenon of title drops in movies, e.g. by someone who'd gone through a bunch of movies and tallied which of them contain title drops. But the linked article is just garbage.
It's possible there are just more lines of dialogue in Barbie than It, given the conventions around each genre. I haven't seen It, but I can assume with It being a horror film there are longer periods with no dialogue for suspense etc.
While it is somewhat arbitrary, I am sure that "Barbie" is intentional, the somewhat obnoxious repetition of the word "Barbie" fits the theme. Also, maybe you stopped reading a little too early as the case where the title is a character name is specially addressed.
"It" may be the the special case here, as it is a very common word by itself but that a movie is named like this is notable enough for it to be included.
Intentionality matters. "It" should not count as a title drop. Nor Barbie (or any movie where the title is the characters name). But I understand it would be way more difficult to run the numbers with such a constraint. But this is a case where, to me, the results are very much tainted and thus I had to stop reading. To me this is like when developers run into a hard issue and somehow play a game of semantics with the wording of a ticket to avoid putting together something useful for the user
> How sure are we that these so-called title drops are what this article purports them to be
What does the article purport them to be? Right at the top I see:
> A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they're in.
That makes no distinction if the title or the script came first. The article does call out movies who do that in a cringe or obvious way (like Suicide Squad, which had prior art) but also includes movies where that is unavoidable, such as Barbie.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter which came first. As soon as you make a line and a title the same, the line becomes a title drop. The audience sees the final product, not the process.
> An analogy
That analogy doesn’t work. Songs are typically repetitive and a few minutes long. Everyone expects them to name the title. A movie, on the other hand, is an experience that asks suspension of disbelief from you, it tries to engross you in its world over the course of multiple hours. When a character title drops, in a second you’re suddenly and forcefully pulled back from the illusion and reminded you’re watching a movie.
Have you stopped scrolling once you realized that? The article acknowledges that, and even has a special category of movies named after characters with just a single title drop.
That said, Barbie is a funny case indeed, as it's named after about half of its characters :P
Barbie could be en even better movie if one did a shot each time the name was heard.
I'm imagining some film school student explaining how Barbie would have been a better movie, a real film even, without mentioning the character's name.
Including films where the title is a character name makes the data set less interesting. “Barbie title-drops a ton!” yeah ok.
But surely Barbie does nowhere near as well if it doesn’t have the Barbie IP. The movie plays largely as a parody of Barbie anyway, so it’s very easy to imagine nearly the exact same movie with a find/replace on a few trademarks in the screenplay and logos on screen. And I think that movie would have had a niche audience that adores it, but wouldn’t have broken out into the phenomenon we saw.
Reminds me of Ken in the Barbie movie:
> Actually my job, it’s just "beach"
It is doing the right thing in densifying and it has much better public transit than people give it credit for.
LAX is probably the easiest big city airport to walk out of in the US with the very strange exception of San Diego. There's a freakin' shuttle bus that rides the HOV lane on the freeway to the downtown with a view that would have inspired The Jetsons. It drops you less than a block from the subway which in turn drops you off right at Hollywood and Vine with a large amount of accommodation in a two block radius.
People say "nobody rides the bus" but when you get on one it is packed, service is not bad at all. If you need a cab occasionally, the service is just great.
In movies like Barbie you see people walk from Venice Beach to the downtown, it's a very long walk (15 miles!) but it's a fairly comfortable walk where you won't encounter any difficult obstacles unlike the average American city.
Sideways
Back To The Future
Cinema Paradiso
Spaceballs
Up In Smoke (Cheech & Chong)
The Incredibles
Indiana Jones 1-3
Indiana Jones: Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (Rifftrax only)
Falling Down
Office Space
Man Bites Dog
Nothing To Lose
Idiocracy
Space Mutiny (MST3k)
Goodfellas
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Groundhog Day
Barbie
Full Metal Jacket
Mallrats
Flight Of The Navigator
The Founder
One Hour Photo
---
I'm pretty certain I've rewatched Sideways more than any other film.
> Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications
We don't have to accept this though, everyone in the modern world makes a choice to accept the implied requirements of being part of the system. We accept the assumption that we are all online, that we all have a mobile phone, and that we all keep up with news and pop culture to an extent that we all seem to zero in on the same transient topic like a solar eclipse or an interest in atching movies about both Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Anyone can choose to avoid any one of these parts of the modern world. We're parts of that world, we aren't victims of it.
I will preface this by saying I think people should do whatever it is they want to do, physical limitations willing.
My (possibly contentious) question: Is this an OK thing to do?
Why are we allowing a vast minority of people to rewrite our social norms? I went to the Barbie film as a man nearing middle-aged and had the most young girls, mothers, teenage girls, and women in general I've ever seen in an audience at the cinema.
Is that a bad thing? Why can't girls and women enjoy the "stereotype" of Barbie? As long as we're giving them the option to do whatever they want and they're not forced to enjoy Barbie.
I don't know why we have to pretend that gender bias doesn't exist or try to "correct" for it. To me that is extremely condescending to girls and women who chose/want to live in a stereotypically feminine way.
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the pinnacle event that solidified the US being a nuclear super power. Its willful use of nuclear weapons on civilians is one of the main ways the US projected power in the last century. The movie not showing how the sausage was made, is because Hollywood has a tendency to show propaganda movies. US good, world bad.
This movie had a huge reach.
"Economist / YouGov Poll, which found that 32% of U.S. adult citizens say they had seen "Barbie" and 24% had seen "Oppenheimer."
A nuclear conflict with Russia, is what is on the table.
Perhaps, if US citizens were exposed to graphic brutality of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it might sway political opinion. And for example influence the next election.
>So the Tokyo firebombing alone is sufficient then?
Is it sufficient for you? It might not be for some people.
However, all plausible deniability is lost, that you're not targeting civilians when you nuclear bomb their city.
If Putin deployed nuclear weapons on Kiev tomorrow, with the goal of ending the war faster, it would be a war crime. I hope we agree.
What on earth is an "anti-woke" bank? Does it automatically decline your card transaction when you try to buy tickets to see the Barbie movie or something?
It sounds like you’re saying you knew the Top Gun Maverick shots were CGI because you know a lot about planes, not because the footage looks wrong.
Barbie was chroma keyed - they discuss it in the aforementioned YouTube videos.
And, yes,I know blue aliens don’t exist. But parts of that movie are composited mixtures of CGI and humans in body paint. The point is that you can’t distinguish the digital from the physical.
And, really, what about Brokeback Mountain?
Let's say collectivism is the opposite of individualism, so if I was to take a collectivist mindset about my car choice something I might consider would be making sure I can see the other people in my community well while driving (because cars are dangerous) and I don't want to hurt someone. I'd argue that the opposite of that choice would be to buy a larger vehicle which makes me more safe at the expense of other people, by making them harder to see and hurting people more because of vehicle mass.
As for masculinity, anyone regardless of their gender can do stereotypically masculine or feminine things. For example men who do drag are generally dressing in a more classical feminine style. In the barbie movie, when the Kens took over they were pictured with a big hummer EV, not any of the other smaller cars we saw in the movie.
None of the explanations in this topic are relevant if they don't address that "Barbie", "Oppenheimer" and "Super Mario Bros" were all hits last year.
Ticket prices, concession prices, streaming, attention spans, originality (or lack of), home theater setups, length of films... all of these factors were in place last year.
It's probably worth looking at specifically why the marketing for the hits from last year was effective (Barbie marketing particularly was both ubiquitous and highly inventive) versus "Furiosa" and "Fall Guy". Also note that Fall Guy's box office was relatively okay compared to something like "The Lost City" but it's budget was much higher, making it a much tougher financial proposition.
The Super Mario Brothers and Barbie movies were big successes. Lots of other cash grabs make money too. But the movies that are coming out now were greenlit years ago, during the era when Marvel showed you could print money with just any lazy movies. Things are different now, but this one was already finished.
This just feels like poor marketing. I am not an avid movie goer. I saw Dune 2 this year and did Barbie/Oppenheimer last year.
In both scenarios I attended due to viral, word-of-mouth marketing. I didn't see specific trailers that compelled me nor was I anxiously awaiting the releases.
In contrast, I heard nothing about Furiosa prior to its release, but have read tons of content about its post-release failure.
Really? You could tell the planes in Top Gun: Maverick were all CGI over reference footage? You could tell the Barbie movie car sequences were shot in front of a green screen (as opposed to a matte painting, which is how it appears)? You could tell that almost all the racing shots in Gran Turismo were CGI?
This wasn't an example given in the video series but what about a movie like Brokeback Mountain? Can you tell which of the sheep or which of the mountaintops are CGI? If you can, that's absolutely shocking to me.
Take a look at this shot: https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/z8wbv4/whats_the_consensus_on_this_shot_from_the_avatar/
Can you tell which parts are CGI and which are practical?
Here's the answer: https://imgur.com/a/Q7UUn2G
That only stops them dividing the prize further, it doesn't stop them awarding for work which in fact took a great many people - only some must be highlighted. I'd guess almost all the modern Physics and Chemistry has a long trail of people who were crucial but didn't get the prize, some of whom the actual winners would cite if asked, and for others they'd probably say "Look it's a cast of thousands, if I forgot to mention you I apologise" or similar.
When a movie wins the Best Picture Oscar, only a few people actually get the physical object, but of course almost all modern movies (especially those likely to get Best Picture) have huge numbers of people involved and even the Producers are too numerous to all get up on stage for some movies. To fix this, a movie that's a plausible Best Picture contender will ensure that it deliberately highlights some of its Producers in the credits as the people to whom such a prize would be awarded. Take "Barbie". Margot Robbie is on that short list of Producers who'd have got the actual statuette if they win Best Picture, in the end Oppenheimer won.
By this broken logic, "Movies are fungible". Because you can turn money into a John Carter, and you can turn Dune: Part 2 into Money. You can borrow against Star Wars, and you can license out Barbie.
But everyone knows, movies are not fungible, because they are not interchangeable. I can buy oil, or unleaded gasoline, and it's basically the same everywhere, it is "replaceable by another nearly-identical item, mutually interchangeable" -- oil and gasoline are fungible. But "Movies" are not fungible, because "Lord of the Rings" is not a replacement for "50 First Dates", which is not a replacement for "The Matrix", even though they're all movies.
Housing is not like Oil, housing is like Movies. It's not fungible, because a 2bedroom row-home in Foster City, CA is not "nearly-identical/mutually interchangeable" with a 4bed,2bath home in suburban Louisville, nor a 1bedroom condo in the Chicago Loop.
Even when the housing is all in the same zip code, much of it is still not fungible with it's alternatives, because housing is so regularly different and unique in a myriad of different ways. ("this one is on a hill, that one is in a valley, it has a higher risk of flooding. This one is in School District A, this house across the street is School District B, this house is in a city with income taxes, this house on the next block over is in a township with no income taxes, that house will need a new roof sooner, this house is in a HOA neighborhood, that house is near the bus line, this house is close to the freeway onramps, that house has fiber but this one is only Comcast Coax, etc")
There's quite a bit of slippy argumentation in this article.
The anecdote about the filming of Barbie is misleading. The UK has been strongly competing with Hollywood for filming for years, as it's one of the few places in the world that has the local high-end moviemaking infrastructure to compete with Hollywood, but without the militant unions. This isn't a new phenomenon and the unions factor is mentioned near the end of the article, even though movies are presented as a new trend at the start.
Then the article goes off on a big Brexit-related hit job. They say "Sterling has lost 15% of its value against the dollar since the 2016 Brexit referendum", "For the stagnating post-Brexit UK economy..." and "The pound’s sharp drop in value". For the real currency story see my other comment but briefly the currency had been in decline since 2014, but reached its pre-referendum value about 18 months after the vote when it became clear the promised 800,000 job losses and "emergency taxes" weren't going to happen. The actual leaving of the EU had little apparent effect either, with GBP/USD being the same now as in 2020.
That makes sense because the UK economy is services-heavy and the EU single market only did anything for goods trading, not services. That's why the UK has always exported more services to the USA than the EU and why leaving didn't actually impact UK/EU trade despite what the article claims. There's a Parliamentary report that shows a graph of long term UK/EU trade (in slow decline due to the falling size of the EU relative to rest of the world) and you can't actually see Brexit on it at all, because the effect was too temporary to show up.
The WSJ also tries to blame inflation on Brexit but again, a quick check of the real charts shows that this isn't the case:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi
Inflation wandered around between the 0%-2% band that the central bank was targeting up until the economically disastrous lockdowns and associated money printing to pay for things like furlough and eat-out-to-help-out (which the US wisely did not copy). The GFC had a much bigger impact on inflation than Brexit.
Incidentally, why was Oppenheimer promoted as an IMAX movie? It was a letdown and a waste for me to have watched it on IMAX, as it was essentially a visually unexciting primarily conversational drama. Barbie would have been a better IMAX movie.
The Barbie being an easier to watch movie than Oppenheimer is a take I didn't expect to see on HN. I'm pretty sure a lot of people on here were a lot more uncomfortable watching the Barbie movie than they were watching Oppenheimer.
I suspect a lot of people even plain didn't see the Barbie movie because they were more comfortable watching a movie that skirts over criticising American fascism/authoritarianism of the 40's and 50's, than watching a movie that treats modern American culture without kid gloves.
They did pretty good given that Barbie got the higher number of views/sales as well as the videos floating around of people who did the whole "Barbieheimer" tour who just surfed TikTok on their phones during the film (because of how bored they were I presume).
If this is how the general public reacted to a movie like Oppenheimer, its impressive how well they actually did viewer wise.
>The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.
And I have the exact opposite view! hah
The Barbie movie felt like a series of clips to me. Not a coherent movie. I also dislike musicals, so maybe personal.
Also despite Oppenheimer being about The Manhattan Project, The Barbie movie felt "too american" for me with weird Twitter references to "The Znyder cut?". (How will that reference age in 2 years?)
Oppenheimer just feels like expertly crafted cinema. I truly got lost in it and the story. The first 20mins felt like 1h in a good way. Truly masterful.
Calling Barbie a better movie because it's easier to watch is something I didn't expect to witness on HN.
> The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.
This is wildly subjective, different people watch movies for very different reasons.
As someone with an interest in the history of physics as I'm sure many people here are, I didn't much like the film either. I liked the renditions of the different physicists and the overall arc of the story, but more like I'd be interested in a documentary.
What's impressive about the movie is that they managed to create drama, artistry and tension in what's fundamentally something you can't really make a movie about because in the end it's just a story of some physicists that successfully accomplished something without anyone really opposing them in any material way.
I think that's laudable and interesting. But if you would judge the movie just based on its entertainment value, I don't think it would score very high. The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.
The Barbie Movie was huge right?
But I would love to see a feminist movie made from "Children of Time". Female Spider society
Where the Female Spiders rule, and eat the men.
And casually talk to each other like "you feel like going to hunt some men tonight", and literally eat them.
The website is giving me an aneurysm to look at, but I did have a laugh sitting through 10 minutes of the Barbie Movie in my terminal.
The direct command from the website is: ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no watch.ascii.theater
We've been post scarcity for "IP" for decades. The cost of making 1 copy of Barbie the Movie is the same as 1 billion copies.
>I made an newsletter where I dump all my really good business ideas onto that I don't have the time to go do.
I feel like the people who typically generate ideas like this tend to be disconnected from actually executing ideas and building a business.
From the last newsletter:
>Liquid Death Branding Strategy
>Replicate Liquid Death's strategy by rebranding mundane products (e.g., pickles, crisps, chocolate) with standout packaging and marketing. They ran up a water brand to $260m in sales last year with really good branding.
This is basically like saying, "Make a movie, but here's the twist: hire a great director, screenwriter, and well-liked actors. Barbie did this and made over $1B at the box office."
It's extremely difficult and expensive to execute successful marketing like Liquid Death, and many businesses burn millions of dollars on it and their business flops anyway.
"Be good at branding" is not a business idea.
Asteroid City. Beau is Afraid. Dream Scenario. Medusa Deluxe. Poor Things. Saltburn. Skinamarink. Smoking Causes Coughing.
Barbie. Oppenheimer.
Soon, The People's Joker, which has been stuck in purgatory since last year given its unconventional telling of a mythos that (on the surface) seems similar to Batman's.
You don't have to like any of these movies, and they're all challenging, but all of them were unconventional and innovative and released to theaters in 2023. This has been a wildly unconventional year, and a fairly exciting one in mainstream cinema.
Oh, wait, what am I arguing against? I read the study, and it says that cinema remains innovative despite discourse arguing otherwise! Indeed.
> I want escapism
I mean going by the highest grossing movies of the year you got plenty to choose from. Other than barbie (which I would argue is not super deep in terms of politics anyway) the rest are all escapism: Super Mario Bros, Fast and furios 10, guardians of the galaxy 3, spiderverse 2, mission impossible, quantumania, little mermaid and elemental are all extremely light in terms of politics.
The three movies with "heaviest" political message are oppenheimer, barbie and even then in case of oppie the message is "mcarthyanism was paranoid and political engagement was stiffled as well as weaponised for personal and selfish goals" certainly not a super crazy political opinion that america's red scare went too far. And in terms of Barbie its mostly surface level "its not easy to be a woman" and capitalism takes advantage of people. But saying "self actualisation is hard with economic forces pushing against you, and some parts of the patriarchy have a compounding effect on women in terms of how difficult it is" is incredibly milktoast feminism even if its pushing the boundries in a movie that is essentially a toy ad that lasts 2 hours.
I don't know what kind of media you think does not allow Escapism and its so absolutely drenched in political content that is impossible to enjoy.
Most emmy noms went to Succession, a shakespearean tale of rich brats picking on each other for father approval and Last of Us, a zombie show about a father daughter found family that shows humans are the worst threat and not the zombies. Neither seems incredibly political.
Videogames this year, top of the crop were Baldur's gate 3, Zelda and Spiderman 2. One is a DnD campaign about power, world domination and brain washing aliens. Another is Ganon is back, you are the hero go make a car and kill him and the last one is Spiderman saves new york from the same guys he has fought since the 1960s.
What is this escapism that existed in the 90s that no longer exist and where is the political undercurrent in all mainstream media that makes it so hard to escape into?
On the competition aspect, I think it's also important to look at the consumer side. For me it was wild knowing Mission Impossible struggled at the box office because of Barbie/Oppenheimer, especially because it was such a big budget film and it was actually my favorite of the three. The reality is that most people would maybe go once a month to the cinema, so they have to prioritize what to watch.
To make matters worse, you are also competing with all of history. If you want to read 12 books this year, when are you going to get to the small creators with years-worth of classics to go through?
Barbie was a shallow representation of the multiple generations of various feminist ideals and discussion points. Only 2nd wave feminism gets any actual discussion, though there's a mild discussion to point out that today's kids are on the 4th wave and have different ideas.
The thing is that most people just agree with 2nd wave Feminism, as its the type that was well regarded and well pushed from the 1950s onwards. So Barbie plays it safe, pushes the older, well-agreed messaging and doesn't stray too far from the guard-rails.
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Like, after watching Barbie, is anyone actually ready to discuss if sex-work / prostitution is pro-Feminisim or anti-Feminism? Erm... no. It avoided any sketchy issue or anything remotely controversial.
Is sex-work pro-Feminism because women can decide how to act for themselves and use their innate femininity to gain power over males?
Or is sex-work anti-Feminism because males who enjoy sexual material can turn into malicious actors who play into bad stereotypes and harmful myths? (And thus the females who partake in it are subject to male-gaze or something, its been a while since I've read feminist writing)
Nothing wrong with that mind you. Barbie was designed to just be enjoyable, but it is a watered down discussion. But the minute real-world issues show up, you're hopelessly unprepared if you've only reached the surface-level that Barbie-movie brought you to.
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Hell, even just the 4th wave feminist child vs 2nd wave feminist mother dynamic in Barbie is so... short and shallow. The movie just leaves off without much debate, or exploration of the contradictory viewpoints. The only conclusion at the end is the younger generation might find Barbie fun if we play with them together, which is... absolutely avoiding the deeper issues and debates brought up in the movie.
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Oppenheimer on the other hand... gives you far more capability to discuss the pros-and-cons of the 1940s / 1950s politics of nuclear weapons. Its very deep on the subject.
Funny, my take on Oppenheimer is the opposite -- and I loved both movies.
Nolan is making the explicit argument that Oppenheimer is the most important person of the 20th century, it's literally a biopic that adheres (shockingly) faithfully to history, is explaining everything to you from the history of Los Alamos to justifications to drop the bomb to arguments for and against the H-bomb, and you come out of the theater absolutely ready to debate the issues.
Oppenheimer is the literal opposite of art for art's sake. It's a straight-up history lesson that presents different sides of one of the biggest moral questions of the 20th century.
Now other films of his, whether Tenet or Inception or Interstellar -- those are much more art-for-art's-sake. You can discuss them aesthetically all you want, but aside from questions of taste and clarity and plot, there isn't much of substance to debate.
(On the other hand -- while Barbie was hyped as providing a lot to discuss, it was actually mostly just a very clever super funny comedy. It didn't really lead to all that much debate, aside from whether the idea of playing guitar "at" someone was merely a really funny joke, or one of top five funniest jokes in the movie...)
I broadly agree, but Barbie was both entertaining and very successful. It's also not a Disney movie. It would be a better example of how you can make a good, successful, didactic movie if you have very sharp filmmakers with enough pull to get it done their way.
See ‘Didacticism’:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didacticism
vs ‘Art for art’s sake’:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_art%27s_sake
The Barbie movie is highly didactic. It’s like a series of college essays strung together on a thin string of story. You come out of the the theater ready to debate the issues in the movie.
Oppenheimer on the other hand is ‘art for art’s sake’. It’s not trying to ‘splain anything to you. You come out of the theater speechless, just carrying the weight of it all.
Edit: Barbenheimer.
Bard is getting quite good at queries for upto date info:
“What was the last FED announcement?”
“When does Apple announce results”
“Where can I see the Barbie movie online in Finland”
Google Search has a vast system gathering live data that can be added to Bard - as probably is being done to Bing
Isn't this because the mid range is going straight into the streaming services, rather than through (an I assume expensive) distribution process into theaters?
Theater going is expensive (I think it's expensive), the alternatives are "pretty good", so that impacts overall theater presence.
Having a "block buster" that can justify the expense of marketing and distributing to the now weaker theater market seems like a prudent thing for the studios and it's just part of the current reality of entertainment.
I know I don't see many movies in the theater. I don't know if I've seen anything since Top Gun. I was hoping to see Dune 2, but it's delayed. I will be seeing the Ferrari bio-pic, simply because I'm a Mann nut. Otherwise, we rented Barbie. We rented GoG3, we'll be renting Oppenheimer.
And whatever other random stuff I sleep through from Netflix.
2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations.
So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.
> Get woke, go broke
as proven by famous box office flop, the Barbie movie
Nah, I think this is bullshit. One of the big movie of this year was Barbie, which is way more 'woke' than any Disney. A pretty 'woke' movie was honor among thieves, which wasn't great but still a better adventure/story than all recent Disney/Marvel movies (who imo are less 'woke', but I do not know the exact definition). Eeaao is also quite woke and was a huge success (the best postmodern film since Blade runner imho), and Dune was critiqued for 'being woke', and was still a success (I'd call it the worst Villeneuve movie, but it was mostly okay).
No,the reason why Disney movies fail is because they are bland rehash of already existing movies, who follow marketing instead of authors/directors. In general, I'm really disappointed in new movies from known directors, the worst being in my mind, Ridley Scott (who created the best medieval movie in 2007, and now all his recent film shit on historical realism, enough to bother me. And since my father worked on two of his recent movies, I had/have to watch it :/)
Here's the Hollywood Reporter, adding context to an article about how the Barbie movie didn't do well in Korea:
'But in Korea, a country where gender disparity and anti-feminist backlash are prevalent, the film’s focus — albeit uplifting — on female empowerment may have sparked discomfort and even fatigue.
“Given how gender has been politicized and became a polarizing issue in Korea in the past few years, young people seem to be easily exhausted by discussions around gender,” says Kang Yu-jeong, a professor of Cultural Contents at Kangnam University in the city of Yongin. “It’s such a sensitive topic for the younger generation — the film’s main target — that they want to avoid it entirely.”'
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/why-barbie-movie-not-successful-south-korea-1235558639/
The situation is pretty extreme. E.G. https://news.sky.com/story/plastic-surgery-south-korea-faces-beauty-backlash-11871654
At this point I think it's the principle of the thing. I mean I have premium but I still want them to get smacked down for this because Google made one of the endgame moves to drink verification can.
Ads are supposed to incidental, you run ads and if too many people block them because they suck then congrats sucks for you. If no one sees them then sucks for you. Most people put up with TV ads when they're not even hard to skip. And for some reason IG ads are well liked. Forcing them harder I think has to make us confront what we're really doing here and what we're gaining by all this. Just pay for premium sounds nice when you don't think about it. If there's no universe where someone might actually prefer the ads if they were the same price then we're kinda admitting they have literally zero value to the viewer.
And that paints a very different picture of advertising than "the grease of the economic wheel" ya know? And clearly all advertising isn't like this, like I paid to see the Lego movie, Barbie was fantastic. I watched a YT video of a woman showing her design process for a product she's selling and it was fascinating but it was also just an ad. But if YT are there to suck just so you'll pay for it to suck less than that's not mutually beneficial trade that's extortion.
Comic book movies seem to be dethroning themselves. Super Mario coincidentally being #2 at the box office would be the sort of tipping point for the studios to hungrily eye an alternate source of IP to adapt. (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2023/ - I will concede that FNAF is all the way at #18, which isn't very impressive).
I mean, they're already greenlighting nearly twenty Mattel based projects just because of Barbie (https://www.insider.com/all-upcoming-movies-mattel-toys-barbie-2023-7), it seems like Hollywood hasn't come a long way from the video's intro anecdote about how the original Batman movie ushered in a wave of adaptations of retro pulp heroes, rather than the more naturally lucrative choice of comic book adaptations. So who's to say they won't look at the similar success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and mine video game IP for adaptations?
At the same time, I think that other than for Daniel Kaluuya's 'A24-Type' Barney movie, most of the Mattel projects are not even going to see the light of day. It's a much more limited IP vein and once there's a box office bomb or two, the studios will quickly put the kibosh on the outlandish idea. Battleship, for instance, didn't exactly unleash a huge trend of board game movies.
Outside of the theaters, The Last of Us being a huge hit and a critical darling would seem to indicate that after decades, we might finally be seeing the end of the video game adaptation curse. The fact that there are any quality video game adaptations now, let alone successful ones, is itself a sea change. And as the video theorizes, maybe this isn't 2008 so much as it's the early '00s when the original X-Men and Spider-Man adaptations came out. A sign of the shift that is to come. But I firmly do believe it so to come. There are far more video games than there are Marvel/DC superhero properties. More genres, even.
How on Earth does this guy make a 10 minute long video out of this being the year video game movies dethrone comic book flicks with only two films as evidence? Super Mario and FNAF barely make a pattern, let alone a trend. I don't think you have to worry about drowning in video game films just yet. Meanwhile, Mattel have something like 45 films in the pipeline following Barbie. Point your dread that way instead.
Eh, I mean it's hard to say if there's any correlation between bad movies and progressive movies. Some of the best movies recently are progressive (everything everywhere all at once, barbie). Some recent shows from Disney are terrific too (Andor).
Some terrible shows aren't progressive at all.
There are definitely cases that people morally blame audiences as a false cover for a bad movie, but there are also people who can't enjoy great movies if they can find any progressive meaning in them and make a career about ranting about it.
If you look at the entire history of Barbie media, the new movie is a complete departure in terms of its tone/approach/etc. You may not have liked it, but it was definitely a risk--there was a decent chance of it being a bomb that tarnished the entire brand, but it seems like the reverse happened.
I didn't think the Barbie movie was that unexpected. It was a thinly veiled attempt at making Mattel seem authentic (in the corporate marketing sense).
It's just a step up from having a snarky Twitter account to "connect with a new generation of customers".
(How the movie portrayed Mattel's founder is proof of how the movie is just a brand update and far from the piece of art some say it is).
It would be cool if they got some interesting writer that could come up with some really innovative script, I think the Barbie movie played surprisingly well in the unexpected, and got a big payout for the risk. I have no idea what the Zelda movie could be, but I think going for Majora Mask or Wind Waker (less traditional Zelda), gives more possibilities for something different. Alternative would be insane budget LotR approach for something epic, but I think I would prefer the more arthouse film approach.
This thread is about Google or Netflix blocking in-video/in-movie ads. It's a freedom to experience a creative expression in the way its creator made it. Should Netflix just never air Barbie or Transformers or LEGO movie because they are basically just one big ad? Should Google or Netflix even be in the business of deciding which part of a movie or an uploaded video is an ad or a sponsorship or monetize-able? matheusmoreira is suggesting they check with him first and he can decide which part should be blocked and which is ok.
What if you have a product placement for jack daniels because the character in your movie is the type of character that will chug jack. Should it be up to Netflix to decide "umm, no, this character now drinks Mack Lanyals" who cares what the film maker made?
lol. Let’s not throw Latin / Asian culture under the bus when the implicit alternative being posed is American culture. Pot meet kettle.
Remember what old mate says to Ryan Gosling in the Barbie movie? “We’re just better at hiding it.”
Robbing the creator of their income... As if they have a right to sales.
Then you have a large number of low quality/low effort and high price "products". It's not enough to just create something, it must be good. You can't just for instance create a piece of music that sounds terrible and expect it to sell, then blame piracy for lost sales, or make a low budget "film" with your phone and expect people to pay , idk how much a movie DVD or blue ray or whatever medium it is nowadays costs and blame piracy again.
Or recent real life example, Diablo 4. Low effort, unfinished game with a static map and huge pointless grind and they wanted 70€. 100€ for the deluxe edition including season 1 pass. A complete failure of a game, unfinished, boring and overpriced. EA has started selling their new games for 70€ base now. I can't and won't afford that.
I have my go to MMORPG which I play out of boredom and I download a pirated game every so often. Most of the time this game gets uninstalled very quickly. So there I saw the game, saw it was bad and no harm done. Then there are games I liked playing (BG3) or did not like (Starfield) but still played and did not buy, because the price is too expensive BG3 60€, Starfield 70€ (if Diablo 4 can so can we, right).
Movies, man I pay 23€ / month for a TV streaming service that is buggy and has loads of ads. Sometimes I dick around and go to some online movie and series platform and watch the Disney Star Wars series or Star Trek. The Star Trek series are particularly disappointing and I'm glad I didn't pay some subscription service for temporary access to their platform.
I was subscribed to HBO Go but only as part of the local ISP's TV bundle. When it became HBO Max it became much worse. Also the content is "woke" as far I understand the word woke being used. LGBT propaganda. I'm not interested in seeing that. Netflix, part of an ISP package for 1 year. I barely watched it. The series are uninteresting. The one movie I saw that was somewhat good was "Don't look up". If the pirate offerings were not available I would just not watch the stuff.
When I was young I had CD and vynil collections, I DJed, I created music. I spent so much money to in the end have my records and CDs stolen and my career ended. Music and movies, series, all disposable "art".
How I spend my time is playing games or coding and watching Twitch IRL streams on the side, enough to make some noise and you get to see different places around the globe.
Nowadays movies are just superhero shit and Barbie and other stupid nonsensical stuff. Low quality/ effort stuff and overpriced. And tons of recreations/remasters. Same for games, a lot of low quality and effort, high price garbage and remasters.
Quality over quantity.
You don't need much, you need 1 thing that's good.
And the thing with streaming service, either they're not available in my country or they're expensive. 8€ per month or more to access, temporary access to a limited collection of content. And if you want it all, you have to subscribe to 4 5 or more services all with their own little walled garden app. And in terms of Netflix, they're so hostile towards their users. Sharing the account with someone in your house is against their rules? Fuck off. They pay flat rate for their egress. It's just pure greed. I'm not playing their game.
Let's see if dictator dang shadowbanned me, because he doesn't like the truth, like all little silicon valley bitches
The problem with a UCLA-sponsored survey of teens is always going to be response bias.
For example:
>Very few adolescents prefer aspirational content. The majority favor original content over IP-based content. Also, the majority prefer binge releases over weekly releases.
A quick search of the top Youtubers shows that Gen Z in fact loves aspirational content, they just don't like the image that comes into their head when they hear the term.
A quick scan of the box office shows that they also love IP-based content, unless all the viewers of Spiderman, Barbie, Mario, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fast X, and The Little Mermaid were over 25 (Hell, even Oppenheimer was technically IP-based).
I believe the binge watching thing though.
Which is better?
1. “After bringing my date to see the Barbie movie, we picked up a pair of blue Ray Bans at Sunglass Hut and a new top from the Gucci pop up across the plaza. Kim Kardashian was debuting a new product line.”
2. “After bringing my date to see the year’s blockbuster film, we picked up a blue pair of designer sun glasses at a mall sunglasses kiosk and a new top from a brand name designer pop up across the plaza. A TV celebrity was debuting a new product line.”
#2 would age better since it’s more generic. But I like #1 since the time and place of the scene is more deeply encoded in the story.
What if an AI model took the Barbie movie and added a filter to change the hue of every pixel and altered the voices to have Australian accents instead of American accents?
I wonder if Disney would sue if you tried to sell and distribute despite 100% of the pixels and audio file not exactly copying the original.
(Rhetorical question, Disney would definitely sue)
I could name plenty of other systems nobody wants and speak to their uptime, too? My Plex server probably has better uptime than GitHub lately but I’m not gonna start pushing my code there. It does its job serving the barbie movie, just like defi tells me who to unfollow.
> Dimension Apple trip destinations have become increasingly vague, as the “Road Trip” group chat suggests, part of an overall and troubling vague-ening of the Dimension Apple
This bit was hilarious. It's comfort food in the same vein as the Barbie movie - everyone is polished and no one needs to work.
This is an interesting take. A lot of the big artists these days (Doja Cat, Megan thee Stallion, Charli XCX, to name a few) all heavily sample.
In some cases the new hits have multiple levels of sampling; Latto’s Big Energy has a remix with Mariah Carey’s Fantasy, and both sample Tom Tom Club’s Genius of Love. Charli XCX interpolates both Hey Mickey and Robyn for her new song from the Barbie movie.
I have only paid for one movie in 10 or so years, and that was buying Barbie on iTunes because I loved it.
Otherwise, there hasn’t been anything worth paying for to me vs contributing to a few Youtuber’s Patreons.
HBO is the only streaming service I’ve found useful or good.
I liked the concepts a lot. But the money part was ambiguous.
As in:
1. Get fascinated by some area a community is interested in
2. Dig into it, find and overcome challenges
3. Create an offshoot community around your insights
4. ???
5. Profit
I feel like Ken in the Barbie Movie had 1-3. He was really into "Beach". And lots of people liked "Beach". But that didn't lead to any money in the real world.
A follow up essay on that missing link would be great.
Feels like if it were widespread on both sides it wouldn't be all that challenging for you to come up with an example. What's the prominent leftist equivalent of Ben Shapiro ranting for 43 minutes about the Barbie movie? (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ben-shapiro-barbie-movie-rant-b2381253.html)
Definitely felt this with IMDB and now also RT. Sometimes it’s political, but more often it seems like new mediocre movies get amazing ratings, which just didn’t add up. For a while, I thought it was just enthusiast bias but it makes more sense that there’s gaming going on. “Foreign” movies very often get shit ratings, especially when they don’t copy-paste the Anglo-Hollywood style and tropes.
In either case, my best advice for reviews in general is: take it with a big grain of salt. Ie don’t compare 7.5 with 7.8. Barbie vs Oppenheimer ratings is not gonna tell you anything useful, even if there’s no gaming going on. Never obsess over subjective measurements.
Instead, use a 5.2 rating as an indicator that it’s very likely to be bad. But if it’s say a documentary about something you have nerded out on, then it may have you glued to the screen.
Bingo. You could also make this much bigger than a single product category.
If you have enough people willing to mindlessly to swipe on random comparisons during the day so they can see their own report, and you could properly sort and tag all categories, you could have a truly bonkers data set. Like whether dollar for dollar consumers prefer the Barbie movie to owning a Porsche Cayenne.
Yeah, the audience score is in no way an accurate measure of quality because it is provided by a self-selected group of people who both paid for the movie and went online to rate it. The end result is that a lot of movies viewed as failures will have high audience ratings as long as they can reach some small passionate audience. Just looking at some current movies:
Blue Beetle: 78% critics, 92% audience
Gran Turismo: 63%, 98%
Elemental: 74%, 93%
Meg 2: 29% 73%
Haunted Mansion 38%, 84%
Indiana Jones: 69%, 88%
Little Mermaid 67%, 94%
Those audience scores are not "more accurate" in any way. People who are forced to see these movies like them less than people who chose to see it.
There also really isn't anything currently that fits into "the political correctness / marketing budget of the movie" claim of OP. It seems like they are just buying into cultural war nonsense. The closest I can find is Barbie and its critic score is 5% higher than the audience score, so not much of a gap.
Don't think it's to do with ownership. Google reviews have the same problem. There are tons of 1 star reviews that praise movies with what sounds like critic or AI written text.
Try searching for barbie movie for an example. Click more reviews and filter by 1 star. The third says:
"Barbie," director and co-writer Greta Gerwig’s summer splash, is a dazzling achievement, both technically and in tone. It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry. So crammed with impeccable attention to detail is "Barbie” that you couldn’t possibly catch it all in a single sitting; you’d have to devote an entire viewing just to the accessories, for example.
It even says ADVERTISEMENT in capital letters but below the fold where you have to expand the whole review to see it. Despite that this review directly contradicts its star rating, 774 "people" have marked it as helpful.
Scroll down a bit further and there is another, "If this was an item on the McDonald’s menu, it would be everyone’s favourite - the Oreo McFlurry. Hands down, I don’t think I could name a better film. The acting was superb!" which supposedly nearly a thousand people found helpful. This one doesn't say anywhere that it's an ad.
When I first noticed this, almost all the top 1 star reviews were ads. Real users have been correcting it and the top two reviews are now real. The second review says "Update: if you notice google is showing mostly 5 star reviews when there is almost an equal number of 1 stars to 5 stars hence why the average is 3 stars." and the 5th post says "I noticed a few giving spectaculars about the movie but rating it as one star, maybe to drown out the real reviews?" so irate users have been noticing the manipulation too.
It's really very embarrassing for Google. It's gone now but originally when you searched for this movie there was a special pink sparkle effect. So they're paying engineers to write special code just for this movie whilst ignoring obvious fake reviews, claiming they were meta-reviewed by thousands of people and they still haven't cleaned this up even weeks later.
"Girl power, this is not. Barbie reads like textbook Adorno: late capitalism is savvy enough to incorporate its own critiques to inoculate itself from any pushback."
Interesting takes overall; a "hacking/unpacking" of the film that I'll keep in mind when I eventually borrow it from the library for Movie Night.
I'll keep reading bell hooks and Octavia Butler and Alison Bechdel (Fun Home was great- as a man without great father figures, the best and most healthily masculine being Mr. Rogers, I realize as I play those albums for my daughter, I felt some solidarity) and also Romance novels for my ongoing education about how to be a better human being (and of course entertainment, too). If I could travel back in time to give my teenage self some books, Parable of the Sower would be one.
> "I've been looking forward to watching this film, but it's frustratingly not been available in the UK ... this regional specific delay feels really quite outdated."
Now days, most big budget/big studio films are released simultaneously in major markets around the world. For example, Barbie and Oppenheimer were released on the same day in most of the major markets.
But smaller independent releases like this typically aren't, because different companies often bid on the distribution rights separately for different markets. In this case, it was released in Canada by Elevation Pictures, in the USA by IFC Films, and internationally by Paramount.
In the UK & Ireland it will be released (exclusively in cinemas) on October 6th, and looks like it will get fairly wide distribution.
> Many Western blockbuster movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer included, disseminate ideas that are antagonistic to Putin's fascist narrative.
This is so wonderfully, innocently naïve. Thank you for writing it. God bless America.
For Putin's government the key here is censorship of Western content.
Many Western blockbuster movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer included, disseminate ideas that are antagonistic to Putin's fascist narrative. Barbie is, among other things, a play on feminism and on democratic values - think Ken's voting a new Constitution! It's only logical that Putin does not want "foreign agents" distorting the regime's narrative massively distributed to its 83 federal subjects ("federal states").
China has been doing this for ages now by picking a handful of foreign films / year and demanding the Statue of Liberty be removed from film. However, the Chinese market is so yummy that Western blockbuster productions will often self-censor to make sure they make the cut [1]. Putin is getting the opposite in fact, the West is high on anti-Russian sentiments for the last decade or so, and that has trickled down into content. Remember when under Boris Yeltsin that Western productions got plenty of "good Russians" after the Iron Curtain melted down?
[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/censorship-of-hollywood-blockbuster-films-intensifies-in-china-/6557850.html
> A furious cinema chief has accused the fund and government of protecting Western copyright holders. He says that Russia needs pirated copies of Barbie in cinemas, sooner rather than later.
The grass is green, the water is wet, a capitalist wanting back his 100 per cent is totally okay to trample on human laws, other news at 11.
The massive irony of wanting a movie like Barbie - nightly the TV propogandists rail against the decedent west and their immorality and that Russia is somehow involved in fighting a holy war in Ukraine.
>They came out on the same day, they have the same budget for production, gorgeous well-known actors, but there is one big difference. Directors spent $150 million on the marketing of Barbie, while $145 million was spent on the creation. Oppenheimer did not allocate such a budget for marketing.
Interesting, because I've heard about the Oppenheimer movie but not about the Barbie movie. The only time I've heard about the movie is after the fact, via the comparison with the Oppenheimer movie. I might not be the target audience, but it completely was stealth.
I have watched none of them yet.
>Marketing is an amazing tool, especially when it is handled by a team of professionals, so if the product is great, then it is strange to neglect it. But is it possible to make a cool product without focusing on marketing?
What's no marketing? It is developing a product in secret, in a bunker somewhere, and never telling someone about it. How will people who have the problem your product solves, i.e: the market, know about it? If the market doesn't know about it, where will sales come from? That's akin to someone who never gets out of the house and complains about being an "Incel". Not putting your product out there leads to "InSale" (just came up with this).
Not only that, but how will you know that your product actually solves the problem you think it's solving if you don't expose it to the market and target audience? You have to reduce that risk by exposing your product to the market and reality as early as possible. Maybe your target audience just doesn't really care about spending money on solving that problem and only complain about it? How will you improve the product/discover bugs if there isn't an influx of people using it, and how will they use it if they have never heard of it.
Saying marketing is a tool is like saying sales is a tool.
Assuming that the "barbenheimer" effect is what made people shy away seems to miss the occam's razor possibility: It's really not a great movie.
Okay, maybe that was just my opinion. Let's back that up.
The Barbie movie is incredibly dependent on cultural tropes, and targets both the nostalgia bone with its Barbie references and the cultural feelings of American women of a certain age.
Yes, the movie was very popular here. Because it targeted a very specific, yet very large, audience. It seems incredibly likely to me that the simple explanation for it's low acceptance in Japan is simply that the very specific audience it appeals to is quite small in Japan.
An n=1 sample of "stayed away due to oppenheimer marketing" makes this an entirely useless article.
Author posits the Barbie movie was heavily promoted alongside Oppenheimer.
>But for the most part, it looks as if the “Barbie” movie’s celebration of diversity and the message of female empowerment will be overpowered by its association with the atomic bomb — and that the movie won’t have a positive, lasting impact in Japan. What a shame.
One possible angle was that Barbie's fantasy world is a product of a post-nuclear USA. I thought that maybe there was no Japanese love for this period in American history, but apparently, I was wrong:
https://japantoday.com/category/features/travel/Johnson-Town-Japan%27s-own-little-slice-of-1950s-America
https://www.heddels.com/2014/07/japan-love-mid-century-america-much/
Although I suppose it's possible that opinions have changed since those times. Personally I don't really have any direct exposure to Japan, but I see the anti-American sentiment in works by some of my favorite people in their animation industry (Shirow Masamune, Kenji Kamiyama, Hayao Miyazaki).
I think it is about "it".
Barbie is a light and fun movie, and a shorter movie than Oppenheimer. I have a PhD in physics, I have been to the Trinity site, I've been exposed to the story of the atom bomb over and over again, there is nothing new about it for me. So I went to see Barbie and didn't see Oppenheimer.
That said, the "overnight success" without marketing is a matter of being lucky, you really do want to make your own luck with marketing.
You have Oppenheimer and you have Barbie. They are both "movies" technically but are completely different type of products that happen to use the same media for dissemination. Her books are no different; I like your start-up analogy because she's focused on making money through this particular media and not "writing books" in the same way, let's say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote books.
Most people are not professional movie critics and enjoy more a hollywood film rather than me recording barbie dolls and making them talk.
Did your video game sell as much as outcast? A game with a proper music score.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game)
Does your game have a wikipedia entry?
Could I assume that people enjoyed outcast more than your hobby game?
The difference is 1) the power law distribution of revenue and 2) the finality of a moview.
1: A few movies (e.g. Barbie, Spiderman, Oppenheimer this year) make the majority of the money. Most movies make little. So if you pay based on expected return you probably don't pay your actors at all, or pay them peanuts. That's inequitable. But you can't pay them lots because you don't know how much money the movie is going to make. The solution is profit sharing. Most software business have much more stable income.
2: A movie, when finished, is done. There may be a director's cut in a decade or two if it's a super popular movie. There are occasionally different edits for different markets (alternate endings etc.) But basically it's done. The movie that is shown on release is the movie you watch 20 years later. So you can easily apportion credit to the actors, writers, etc. This isn't the case for software. It continually evolves. You made the initial design, but 64 other developers have worked on it since. Who gets credit?
Poor 22 year old driver, just entered the industry and already taking the blame for what a certain percentage of 60yo foxes have been doing.
Also, many of the violations are a consequence on how this god forsaken industry is structured and that includes our Karen who wants that pink outfit NOW! Because they have tickets to see the Barbie movie tomorrow and the pink T-shirt is an essential part.
Well there you go: you're analysing it and asking what it means. What it represents.
I think it represents a lack of creativity coming out of main stream Hollywood and other "big ticket" industries. Nothing seems original any more. It's _mostly_ all polished, formulaic junk in my opinion (I loved the Barbie movie though - super fun.)
So from my perspective, this sort of thing is culture in that informs us how our society is thinking and what it values.
This is lecture/podcast on Barbie, ideology, gender etc. from the perspective of Zizek, Lacan, Freud and Hegel.
When I walked out of the movie, I wanted to discuss the movie through the lens of Hegel, and just yesterday I found such a discussion. Such a discussion is not only a meme to overintellectualize the movie, but arises naturally from the themes as they were presented.
I won't articulate it succinctly, but Barbie liberates the sexless idealized femininity of the "male gaze" by articulating the contradictions of such an existence, and ends by allowing herself not to be a symbol of the perfect woman, but to be just a woman with accepted flaws and humanity. Ken however goes the opposite direction, starts off as imperfect and dependent on Barbie, and ends by knowing he is perfect how he is, separate from Barbie, and believing that he is one with the symbol of the perfect man, ie, that he is kenough.
"At a “Barbie” showing at an AMC theater in Washington on Sunday, a man wearing a pink tank top and body glitter loudly identified with the Kens onscreen. Throughout the film — and despite multiple shushes — he would cheer, sing or stand up and pump his fist from his front-section seat whenever the Kens rallied against the Barbies."
Watching this was probably more entertaining than the Barbie movie itself...
But, people probably paid $50 to be there...
This essay really hits me wrong. Perhaps its because I am a human and not simply a "unit of production". Also the "personal playing to win strategy" immediately reminds me of the parody program "refuse to lose" from the film "Little Miss Sunshine".
I am a 58 year-old man with a family. Today I'm giving the eulogy at my Uncle's memorial. In the last weeks of his life I was one of his principal care givers in home hospice. I've been helping my daughter through one of the most challenging times of her life. My wife just broke her wrist and severely injured her back and had trauma surgery two days ago. The FBI keeps showing up at my door looking for an interview (my brother is a fugitive on the most wanted list). In my view, part of being a man is supporting those around you with strength and love. I haven't seen Barbie or Oppenheimer, I've had to temporarily set aside my FAA training for work. I've been too busy supporting my family during a challenging time. I'm at full capacity.
One thing I've refused to stop doing is working out - so I get up at 5:30 to make sure I can have the time to do so. This is part of my personal care routine that means the most for my mental health as well as my physical health.
Its entirely possible my personal strategy sucks. However I think this essay sucks.
Remote work and async comms means that latency tends to be high. Latency issues can be overcome by not stopping to wait at each decision point.
For example, low latency this is ok: “do you want to go to dinner or a movie?” Movie. ”Do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer?” Oppenheimer. “Do you want to go at 6:00, 7:00, or 8:00?” 8:00.
Instead for high latency, this will cut down on a lot of dead time in back and forth: “Do you want to dinner or see a movie? If you want dinner do you prefer to go to Il Capricio (Italian) or Sushi Go 55? I can make reservations at 6, 6:30, or 7. If you’d rather see a movie, do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer? Barbie is at 6:15, 7:20, and 8:15. Oppenheimer is at 6:00, 7:00, and 8:00.” Let’s do Oppenheimer at 8
It’s more work up front and any unchosen paths are “wasted effort”, but for work there’s usually value in fully exploring the alternate paths anyway.
Elementary school me was introduced to the physicality of Taiwanese parliamentary politics from the Cat in the Hat movie (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rtXccR1h_Ak).
It's an underrated movie tbh, especially given that Barbie got an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes
Barbie yes ... but what about tons of others released mid may til now. Last summer in 2022 many movies made well over 100 million. So the pandemic?
Also Youtube is the most used streaming app followed by TikTok ... how many are watching for free? See Google results for this data https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=are%20people%20using%20tiktok%20more%20then%20netflix
My thoughts are based on the data above, other similar data Ive seen, my own shortening attention span and these years lackluster box-office compared to 2022 (movies from 2022 that opened above and or well above 100 million https://www.boxofficepro.com/the-top-10-movies-of-2022-at-the-domestic-box-office/)
To me Hollywood needs to worry even more so the writers, actors and etc ... a younger demographic the future's attention span looks to be elsewhere and they aren't paying to watch their media.
I literally just got home from seeing Barbie and I don’t think this guy understood what he was watching. Sure, the ‘real world’ of the movie was not exactly like the actual real world. Much is exaggerated for comedic effect. That is how comedy works. In the end, the movie doesn’t actually settle on any pat academic idea of feminism or patriarchy.
Cinema is currently so expensive that it makes little sense to go.
My family of 3 costs easily 100 to go to barbie. Between 60 for tickets and 40 for snacks.
Back on the early 2000s this was about 20 maybe 30.
With the costs soaring I'm only going to movies when a big group wants to go together. Otherwise why. Usually gonna spend an extra $20 on top of it to go to an upscale theater with reclining seats and food ordering services. But that happens maybe once a year or less now.
Just 8 years ago we'd go to the theater once a month give or take.
Hell we can get cheap Broadway tickets for almost the same price as a movie outing.
They'll do that if you criticize the Barbie movie, or fail to.
I also have kids in that range. And by and large, I agree that they would be distraught to not have Netflix/YouTube/etc. However, I also know that blockbuster movies are still raking in the money, as I have family insisting on seeing Barbie this week. Super excited about it. Kids also wanted to see the Mario movie.
And if you have kids in that range, I am willing to bet that you are also in the demographic of people that generally have a natural slowdown in going to movies and things. Turns out, having kids in this age range is a full time job.
None of which is to say you are wrong. I'm just not sold on the evidence, yet. Turns out, there is still plenty of big budget entertainment out there.
normally I'm very suspicious of shilling and astroturfing, and you definitely do get it here on HN - especially wrt China and FAANG - but I don't think it's even remotely out of place that a highly anticipated feministic Barbie film is having columns written about it, or that ... there's a popular youtube video about the subject of the new Christopher Nolan film?
Barbenheimer is vaguely suspicious though, especially this article, describing what is pretty much standard procedure wikipedia fare as if it's a split between the Obamas
It feels like there is some ongoing sophisticated guerrilla marketing campaign to promote these movies. YouTube mysteriously promotes some video about how Oppenheimer was a great physicist, Columns are written about what the Barbie movie has to do with Feminism, and even on Hacker News there are multiple links per day about these two movies. Something is going on here.
I heard recently (on Lex Fridman's podcast with Marc Andreessen) that Oppenheimer was called a "cry-baby scientist" by President Truman, and that his groveling campaign was considered by many to be self-aggrandizing, albeit in a self-deprecating way.
Apparently, his involvement was less significant than many others in the Manhattan Project, but his name became one of the most well-known due to his public outcries, and of course his iconic quote.
I haven't yet seen the movie and I'm looking forward to it; I wonder how much of this is portrayed.
Funny enough, I'm planning a double feature with Oppenheimer and the Barbie movie. Maintaining a healthy relationship involves tradeoffs.
Why does he need to market. I know about this movie because of all of the "not being marketed" news posts. Media is giving them a free marketing coupon it seem. He's playing it well.
That said I rarely see movie marketing anymore. Only movies I know are out are barbie and Oppenheimer due to the meme and my friend insisting we go to both.
I just don't see ads much anymore.
I was deeply skeptical that I would be interested in a movie of Barbie IP. But the opening seconds of the trailer piqued my interest, and then the title card introduced Gerwig's name. I was instantly intrigued.
I hope it's good. (Though I've got a suspicion that a lot of HN users will hate it, and not because of it's girl-coded intellectual property.)
As far as the "meme" of the two movies being together, I think it's the "battle of the sexes" turned on its head. Barbie looks feminine and colorful, full of fantasy, and Oppenheimer looks cold and stark, with the masculine and realist elements of wartime - watching both the movies together would be a blissful whiplash between extremes. It's produced a lot of funny content including that fake trailer that implies Barbie constructed Los Alamos and created the weapon, which made me laugh my head off. People just want to be silly and enjoy something.
The talent on this film is stacked. I was interested the second I saw who was attached.
Greta Gerwig was an indie darling for a decade before she went on to make two highly praised, award-winning films back-to-back.
Noah Baumbach is known for mumblecore indie dramedies like The Squid and the Whale and recently got an Oscar nomination for Marriage Story. The irony of him working on a Barbie movie is intriguing enough.
Margot Robbie has brilliant charisma on screen and this role seems tailor-made for her.
And if you've seen The Nice Guys, you know how hilarious Ryan Gosling can be.
The Barbie movie had one of the best marketing campaigns I have ever seen dating back to the initial announcements. But I think they lost the plot with this contrived connection to Oppenheimer. It feels forced and kind of turns me off to both movies. I try to be a good sport and enjoy the whole marketing production for these kind of cultural events (meaning the Barbie movie), but then they come in hot with this absurd upsell and it just rubs me wrong.
I'm not doing a "double feature", but I am seeing both opening weekend, which is something I haven't done in a long time.
My local film society got a 35mm print of Oppenheimer, which I have tickets to see opening night. Barbie on the other hand I'm happy seeing on a digital screen closer to home.
As a concept I don’t think it’s any sillier than a “LEGO movie,” which was a huge hit with multiple sequels.
It’s all about execution, and the Barbie movie has a promising set of creative people involved.
By the same token, would as many people be excited about an Oppenheimer bio if it wasn’t Chris Nolan in the directors chair? Doubtful.
Because of who wrote/directed and is starring in it... as silly as the subject might be on the surface (which makes it interesting because it's super against type for the creative team), chances are it will be an award circuit darling.
I couldn't care less about Barbie as a brand... don't watch Transformers movies or most superhero movies. This one? Looking forward to it. It's going to be peppered with all sorts of weird and interesting cultural critique and humor.
I’d say that’s almost giving the studios too much credit. No doubt once they saw the meme online they leaned into it, but there is genuine hype for both films, and Barbie esp. seems to be hitting the women demographic particularly strongly. I hadn’t thought of watching both the same day, but now I genuine would like to, just to say I did.
>Warner need Barbie to be a hit, so this bizarre double header is a way for Warner and Universal to get some positive buzz going for their films.
People on /r/boxoffice are saying that if <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbenheimer> works (and so far it seems so), a) there will be business school case studies. b) Expect other informal studio cooperations like this.
The film industry needs as much help as it can get at the moment, all studios have been hit with massive flops this summer. After the Flash, on track to lose at least $200million, Warner need Barbie to be a hit, so this bizarre double header is a way for Warner and Universal to get some positive buzz going for their films. Both of the are tracking to do well, and they didn't cost too much to make like the Flash or Dial of Destiny, so their break even is at a much lower gross.
As entrepreneurs, business owners and marketing pros what strategies can we learn from the massive marketing effort for the Barbie movie?
There's a nice wiki page on this exact topic. In in the US it's just become another branch of the military industrial complex, Wiki calls it the military-entertainment complex. [1] It works using the carrot instead of the stick, but the outcome is largely the same. The military offers funding and access studios that create movies furthering US interests, enlistment, etc. Studios that work against these interests not only lose these opportunities, but risk imperiling access to them in the future.
"By the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, Hollywood producers were stressing script writers to create military-related plots to gain production power from the U.S. military."
The Guardian also has a really great article on this [2] from back before they joined said complex. It comes down to the exact same thing with China. They want those Yuan, and randomly shoehorning controversial geopolitical maps into a Barbie movie is going to help you on that path.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93entertainment_complex
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jul/06/us-military-hollywood
… or, leave the map out of the movie… if the barbie movie turns out to pivot on geopolitics I'll eat a one inch hot pink pair of pumps…
More like COVID caused the shortage (filming in 2022) and this just exacerbated it.
May be a better source than Sky - https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-06-03/barbie-production-design-shortage-pink-paint-greta-gerwig
Original headline for context:
Barbie film used so much pink paint it fuelled a global shortage
No, it did not. "It wiped out an entire company's global supply" is how the Guardian put it [1], right under an almost equally misleading click-bait headline. Only to continue wiggling around the fact that even that is an exaggeration.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jun/05/barbie-film-required-so-much-pink-paint-it-contributed-to-worldwide-shortage
I'll add a data point to your search, here's my results of scrolling Facebook ads. This ignores the "suggested" posts from places like daily mail, which really, are also an ad. This list of ads looks really poor for anything claiming to be targeted.
1 the barbie movie
2 join the us military (I'm australian, and probably too old)
3 KFC
4 jb hifi. This definitely doesn't fit the narrative, this ad offers Apple hardware for less than the Apple store, something they've been threatened over before
5 nrma. A classic case of advertising to someone who has already purchased everything they sell
6 something entirely in a language I can't read. Well done Facebook.
7 vote for some Texas politician if you love God( Australian....)
8 something in Arabic
9 a presumably hacked account where a Persian rug gallery promotes an onlyfans account
10 nrma again
Nothing on this list strikes me as overpriced or otherwise supporting this narrative, but damn the targeting is terrible and I'd hate to be paying for this stuff to get shown to me
I don't really understand how this is news - this is no different than when I spend an hour browsing #antiquewatch and then switch to #denverbroncos and end up on #startups. The same thing happens if you share a netflix account - I had a good laugh with my partner when I started getting barbie movie recommendations.
That doesn't mean Instagram isn't able to track the activity specific to each device though. Just like if you are logged into 5 Instagram accounts on one device they're probably attributing activity to both the active account AND the device.
There was a bit of victimhood in the narrative, particularly around the extramarital affairs. That was my ex-wife's favorite film so I've seen it several times, and I finally deeply read about Kahlo (the Trotsky story especially intrigued me), and the impressions and conclusions I drew regarding some of the portrayed events didn't jibe with how I interpreted them in the film.
Even without considering historical accuracy, after a few viewings, it becomes clear that the film is not well made despite Taymor. I think at the time it was an awards darling because, though it seems much more pedestrian now, a studio system film about a female Mexican cultural icon was even more unlikely to see the light of day then. I remember discussion around it highlighting its progressive nature, so that likely framed reception of the film, despite the occasionally clumsy script and at times loose interpretation of the subject matter. To be honest, when I saw this link pop up on HN, I immediately thought of the film as an example, rather than the Barbie (which is even worse, but oddly, I can't verbalize why).
As for Weinstein, that attributed pull-out quote, if accurate, stands alone to demonstrate thought behind the portrayal. I'd say it's fair.
Many figures are tough to interpret beyond death, to be fair, and maybe we're all wrong about her. Who knows. Arguable she'd find us discussing it amusing.
We exaggerate female proportions so that they are better recognized as female by children. This is true of cartoons (barbie is essentially a cartoon person) TV, film, advertising, even music. When you want to sell something to a group you adopt an image which leaves little room for debate.
This holds true for male dolls too. I saw a great interview with Mark Hamel once about the evolution of Luke Skywalker dolls, which are now more WWE than a realistic portrayal of his character.
Men are rapists and sexual offenders by default.
Men are violent.
If a man finds a woman physically attractive then he is objectifying her.
Men should not be paid according to the merits of their work and ability.
Men should not have any reproductive rights.
Men should continue paying for a woman's lifestyle after a divorce.
Men should recognize their "privilege" and be constantly reminded of it, even though being told you should be ashamed of your gender is at the very heart of sexism.
Men should not be allowed into women's "safe spaces", implying they are dangerous and intimidating by default. Similarly, men should not be allowed to have their own "safe spaces", because that's sexist and exclusionary.
Men cannot have body issues resulting from over-exaggerated muscle-bound heroes in cartoons and movies (He-Man and the like) because they represent a "male power fantasy". But Barbie is responsible for decades of female self-image issues.
Men cannot discuss their issues in a public forum without feminist protestors shutting down discussions.
If a female character chooses to dress provocatively, it is because a man chose to objectify her, not because a woman can take charge of their own sexuality.
If a man is harassed online, it's unfortunate (sometimes). If a woman is harassed online, it's representative of a disturbing trend. Similarly, men cannot understand the plight of a woman's harassment, even if said man also receives daily death threats and has had a gun fired through their living room window.
Men should receive much harsher punishments than women for committing the same crimes.
Only the $1 toys left over from the previous movie are action figures, the toys for the new movie are most definitely Barbie...
If kids really don't have any spending power, we wouldn't have Fruit Loops, Spongebob Squarepants, Barbie, Disney movies, or Harry Potter.
Children drive an enormous amount of consumer spending. Their usage patterns matter.
If anything, extracting money from an adult may be easier indirectly by their children than directly.
Geez, I KNOW that, but now Barbie has legitimized them! I can be a computer engineer AND have a pink laptop!
Better yet, I can ditch my tv-programmed dream of becoming a glamorous doctor/lawyer/detective in favor of becoming a glamorous computer engineer!
My friends and I will drive around in our pink convertible, hacking systems, meeting new geeks and every episode will end with our band playing a song. Maybe techno.