Barbie Breaks Box Office Records as Conservatives Keep Whining About It
Conservatives are complaining that the movie is Communist and “anti-man.” But the people want to see it.
The Barbie movie opened Friday, and it’s already breaking box office records—despite conservatives’ best efforts to bad-mouth the film as woke propaganda.
Barbie stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, who leave Barbie Land to explore the real world. The film has already made $22.3 million at the domestic box office from Thursday previews, the biggest preview haul this summer, blowing the previous record of $17.5 million (made by Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in May) out of the water.
Barbie is anticipated to make as much as $140 million in its opening weekend alone, largely due to its incessant and ingenious marketing campaign. And people on the right have not stopped complaining about it.
Conservatives keep coming up with stupid reasons to hate the movie. They say that the movie is too “woke” for casting Hari Nef, a transgender actress, as Doctor Barbie. They have also blasted Simu Liu, who plays a Ken, for saying the film put “the final nail in the coffin of that very heteronormative idea of what gender is.”
Men have taken to Twitter to insist that Robbie is ugly with no makeup on and they would never deign to have sex with her. Representative Matt Gaetz and his wife went to the movie premiere, after which Ginger Gaetz declared the film highly skippable because it “neglects to address any notion of faith or family” and features “disappointingly low [testosterone] from Ken.” Other film critics have branded Barbie “anti-man.”
Other Republican lawmakers also waded into the fray by insisting the movie is Chinese Communist propaganda. In one scene in Barbie Land, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea.
China has used the nine-dash line to mark its controversial territorial claims in the South China Sea. Over the years, Beijing has tried to claim sovereignty over 90 percent of the region. Even though The Hague ruled in 2016 that China has no legal basis for its claims, the country has pressed on, building military installations on otherwise uninhabited islands in the sea.
Republicans insisted that the shot was a clear indication that Hollywood is in the Chinese Communist Party’s pocket and Barbie is just Communist propaganda. For those wondering, this is the shot in question:
Vietnam has banned the movie over the map, but the Philippines has decided to show it because the “cartoonish map” actually only shows a “make-believe journey” in Barbie Land (half of Asia is missing!).