Director Greta Gerwig has responded to the backlash that Barbie has received from right-wing pundits.
The film which was released last Friday sees Barbie (Margot Robbie) experience an existential crisis and is forced to leave Barbieland to discover her true purpose.
Her kind-of boyfriend Ken (Ryan Gosling) joins her on a journey of self-discovery but soon after they enter the “real world” they learn several home truths about themselves while trying to dodge the fictional chief executive of doll manufacturer Mattel (Will Ferrell).
While the film has been positively received by critics, several conservative commentators, including Ben Shapiro who branded it “woke”, have voiced objection to the movie’s feminist messaging.
The filmmaker, who previously directed Little Women and Ladybird, was asked about comments made by the right-wing in a new interview, which she playfully referred to as “passion”.
Gerwig told The New York Times: “Certainly, there’s a lot of passion.
“My hope for the movie is that it’s an invitation for everybody to be part of the party and let go of the things that aren’t necessarily serving us as either women or men.
“I hope that in all of that passion, if they see it or engage with it, it can give them some of the relief that it gave other people.”
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, 39, notably shared a 43-minute-long video in which he ranted about the supposedly “woke” film. His comments were met with frustration from fans of the movie.
Meanwhile, TalkTV’s Piers Morgan was slammed online after he wrote an op-ed claiming that he would be “executed” if he made his own version of the movie with the gender dynamics reversed.
Morgan claimed: “If I made a movie mocking women as useless dunderheads, constantly attacking ‘the matriarchy,’ and depicting all things feminist as toxic bulls***, I wouldn’t just be cancelled, I’d be executed.”
Since its release, Barbie has given Gerwig the biggest first weekend return at the box office for a female director in film history.
It could now become one of the highest-grossing films ever with a woman behind the camera, with the current record being Jennifer Lee’s Frozen II.
A huge marketing campaign and healthy competition with Oppenheimer, which also opened last Friday, propelled Barbie into the stratosphere of ratings.
Barbie made $377 million (£295 million) at the US box office over the weekend and £18.5 million in the UK.
On the home front, this puts Barbie behind only James Bond film No Time To Die (£21 million) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (£19.5 million) for films released after the pandemic. Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) had the previous record of a UK opening weekend for a film directed by a woman with £13.6 million.
Barbie was the biggest opening for any film in the careers of Robbie and Gosling and puts the film on the threshold of the top 10 of the year so far.
