A billion-dollar comedy about a toy, a patriarchy, and the question of what it costs to become real.
Stereotypical Barbie wakes up in Barbieland one morning thinking about death. Her feet flatten. Her thigh shows cellulite. To repair what is happening to her she must go to the real world, find the human girl playing with her, and resolve their connection. Ken comes along.
In the real world, Ken discovers patriarchy and brings it back to Barbieland with enthusiasm. Barbie meets Gloria, a Mattel employee whose grief about adulthood has been imprinted into her doll. The film resolves with Barbie choosing to leave perfection for the contradictions of being a person.
Barbie is a $145m commissioned property funded by Mattel and Warner Bros. By all the rules of franchise filmmaking it should be brand maintenance. What Gerwig and Noah Baumbach made instead is a comedy that uses its commercial obligations as the joke — the Mattel boardroom is the film's antagonist, the brand's own contradictions are the film's text, and the studio paid for it.
The film's central monologue, delivered by America Ferrera as Gloria, articulates the impossibility of contemporary feminine performance. It is the kind of speech that, in a smaller film, would land as the centre of an A24 drama. In Barbie it is delivered in a pink convertible during a chase scene.
Robbie's Barbie has to play three modes — toy perfection, dawning self-doubt, full humanity — and the performance lands all three. The hardest is the first: it requires comic precision without irony, which is a much narrower channel than it sounds. Robbie was also a producer; her LuckyChap company developed the project for almost a decade.
Ryan Gosling's Ken is the bigger headline performance. He plays a character whose entire psychology is dependent on Barbie's attention and turns that emptiness into the funniest American comic creation of the decade. 'I'm Just Ken' became a chart hit and the film's defining moment.
Barbie grossed $1.45 billion worldwide on a $145m production budget. It is the highest-grossing live-action comedy of all time, the highest-grossing film ever directed by a woman, and one of two films credited with a 2023 box-office resurgence (the other being Oppenheimer, released the same day).
The film's snub at the 2024 Oscars — Gerwig and Robbie both missed nominations for Best Director and Best Actress, while Gosling and Ferrera received nods — became its own news cycle. It also led to one of the film's most discussed sequences: Ferrera's nominations-day reading of her own film's plot back to it.