By “Barbie” has been a true phenomenon, making more than $1.4 billion at the worldwide box office along with rave reviews and generating awards season talk.
Here you had a female-led blockbuster that didn’t shy away from that aspect, wasn’t trying to copy another existing film, was based on an IP that had name recognition but little guarantee of success, and was able to both honor and poke fun at said IP.
One of the big records it broke was becoming the highest-grossing movie from a solo female director in cinematic history – Greta Gerwig’s film beating out the previous record set in 2017 by Patty Jenkins with her “Wonder Woman” film.
In the latest issue of Empire (via Slashfilm), Gerwig credits “Wonder Woman” as laying the path for help making a film like “Barbie” possible and how the success of “Barbie” will pave the way for more to follow:
“There was absolutely nothing to point to before – we weren’t able to use anything as what they call a ‘comp’. That’s how they build budgets, and they assess risk.
I know we wouldn’t have been able to make this movie had Patty Jenkins not made ‘Wonder Woman’. But at the same time, we weren’t able to use ‘Wonder Woman’ as an example, because superheroes are their own category.
You can’t use Disney Princesses because that’s its own category. This didn’t really have a thing that we could point to.
Now this is a comp that other people can use and say, ‘Well, it works here.’ It’s a female character, and it’s a comedy, and Noah [Baumbach] and I wrote it, lady director, all of these things — it’s big, and that worked. So hopefully with other female characters looking forward, that helps.”
She adds that the film is “not like anything else” and “is odd” and hopes in its success that it shows to studios that audiences are open to “things that are just dancing to their own beat” and “moviemakers who have a strange dream”.
“Barbie” is now available for home viewing on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and Digital.
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