There are two kinds of people in this world: people who loved the Barbie movie and people who haven't seen it yet. If you're in the latter category, you don't have much longer to wait for its streaming debut because Barbie is coming to Max on December 15. That's a Max exclusive, and the streamer will also have a version with American Sign Language.
This is a really big deal, because Barbie was a really big movie – as you no doubt noticed from the wall to wall coverage this summer. It was the highest grossing movie of 2023 and for Warner Bros., its highest grossing movie ever.
If you haven't already seen it, you're in for a treat. It's a much smarter and more subversive movie than you'd expect from a movie made about a toy: it's definitely more of a Lego Movie than a Transformers. It likely won't be long until this new Max movie gets added to our best Max movies list soon.
Is Barbie worth streaming?
I'd say yes. I cackled all the way through it and it left me in a good mood that lasted for days. I'm also not the only normally grumpy person who found it to be a ray of sunshine. As the LA Times put it, it's "one of the best films of the year in cinematographic terms, probably the best comedy that we have seen in a long time, and an extraordinarily entertaining product that promotes the value of a more cohesive society." Not bad for a film about a doll.
But of course, it's more than a film about a doll. It takes swipes at the dolts who flock to men's rights activist influencers (and predictably, really upset the dolts who flock to men's rights activist influencers), has some things to say about the dismissal of women in our culture and despite being Hasbro-approved gets away with some pretty serious digs at capitalism too. If that makes it sound incredibly worthy it's far from it: it's a very, very funny movie.
Barbie isn't perfect by any means – if you're not a fan of Will Ferrel's particular kind of comedy it does sag a bit when he's on screen; it's a bit uneven, especially in the middle, and one key speech is absolutely bang-on but does sap the momentum a little. But Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and the many other Barbies are utterly superb and everybody involved is clearly having a whale of a time. It's a lot of fun and I can't wait to watch it all over again.
