This Barbie is a money hungry capitalist!

Kofi Mframa, Opinions Editor

Like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, witnessing humanity’s sins and still choosing to pay the penalty, at the end of “Barbie,” Barbie decides to join the real world after seeing the beauty and pain of the female experience. 

In fact, the whole movie is about Barbie unbecoming “Barbie” and realizing the self-importance that made her believe she cured the misogynistic ills of the “real world” was simply a farce. 

Though rudimentary and didactic at times, director Greta Gerwig examines feminism with her signature emotional depth and beautifully complex portrayal of womanhood. In a way, “Barbie” has become feminism, so much so, that many have turned a blind eye to its incredibly capitalist nature. 

Firstly, Mattel, the company that owns Barbie™, co-produced the movie. This, paired with the $150 million marketing budget, proves it was essentially a money-making vehicle for the same company that, in the first six months of 2023, experienced a 23% decline in global gross billing from the same period in 2022.

The bloated marketing campaign included a pink Xbox, a $1,350 Balmain hoodie, a Progressive ad, a Barbie Dreamhouse in Malibu that’s bookable through Airbnb, and a themed boat cruise sailing through the Boston area — and it doesn’t end there. 

The endless of partnerships and licensing deals made the fanfare around this movie impossible to ignore — and it worked. People of all ages filled theaters dressed pretty in pink, to see the toy of their childhoods come to life. 

Barbie grossed more than $155 million in the U.S. box office over its opening weekend and $70.5 million over its opening day, making it the biggest opening weekend of the year. The money making didn’t stop there. After the movie’s release, Mattel rolled out tens of movie-inspired dolls and accessories. 

To make matters worse, “Barbie” is just the first of 17 live-action movies that have been announced and are in development. Some even suggest as many as 45 movies in development. It’s clear that Mattel is no longer satisfied with being a toy company, but an intellectual universe similar to Disney. 

Movies shouldn’t operate as vehicles to sell us more products. 

The movie even toys with us about Mattel’s profit obsession under the guise of self-awareness. Instead of the Mattel executives being portrayed in the movie as the money-hungry capitalists they are, they are instead portrayed as a gang of “himbos” who are at the beck and call of Will Ferrell, who plays the CEO. The film even jokes about how profit is their only incentive when making new toys. 

We exist in a time of what can only be described as “woke capitalism,” where companies are aware of consumers’ growing social consciousness and are playing into it, whilst trying to maintain the capitalist sentiments that gave them the keys to the kingdom initially. 

This is evident in the Barbie movie, as it adopts the language of social justice. There’s a joke about “Stereotypical Barbie,” played by Margot Robbie, and her attempts at restoring peace to a destroyed Barbieland making her “White Savior Barbie” instead.

She humorously sobs about how she doesn’t “control the railways or flow of commerce” after being called a fascist. Though funny on the surface, it’s dystopian that a corporation is poking fun at these social systems — some of which they benefit from.

What saddens me most is how audiences are claiming this movie to be some kind of savior of cinema, thinking that it will usher in more “original ideas.” But this isn’t even original. It’s a movie adaptation of an incredibly popular toy franchise. Even the trailers that showed before the movie were all spin-offs, sequels or installments of already existing intellectual property, or IP. 

It’s sad that studios are banking on nostalgia to mobilize people to the theater. Even “Barbie,” which many claim to be for young girls, is actually marketed to and made for millennial, nostalgia-pilled women who have the spending power to buy the associated merch and line Mattel’s pockets.

With the ongoing writers’ strike, it’s difficult to imagine a movie not based on already established material garnering a cultural moment as expansive as “Barbie.”

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely enjoyed the movie. It’s just disheartening that movies like this have gained country over the popular zeitgeist and are fueled by greedy movie studios and corporations who only care about their bottom line — our wallets and the future of cinema are simply collateral.