Elon Musk mocks ‘Barbie’ as blockbuster gets conservative backlash

Introducing Culture War Barbie?

Elon Musk entered the Barbie chat mocking the summer’s biggest box office hit on Twitter (or X, or whatever this week calls it).

The Billionaire he wrote: “If you take a photo every time Barbie says the word ‘Patriarchy’, you pass out before the movie ends.”

Musk was responding to a meme from Barbenheimer comparing Twitter to Barbie and his new name X for his social network Oppenheimer.

He is the last to accuse Barbie – from director Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie – of being leftist propaganda on the heels of the film earning the biggest opening weekend of the year, raking in $162 million domestically. Barbie follows “Stereotypical Barbie” (Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) as they leave Barbieland and travel to the real world after an existential crisis.

Mattel executives tried to keep the film from feeling political. Robbie Brenner, executive producer of Mattel Films, said the film was “not a feminist film”. In an interview with Time, Robbie looked surprised by that statement. “Who said this?” he would ask. “It’s not like it is, or it isn’t. It’s a movie. It’s a film that has so much inside.

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro went viral over the weekend after gasping for 43 minutes of the film on YouTube in a clip that has been viewed 1.6 million times. “The basic premise of the film, politically speaking, is that men and women are on two fronts and hate each other. And literally, the only way you can have a happy world is for women to ignore men and men to ignore women,” he enraged. He predicted, “(Barbie is) absolutely going to fall off a cliff (at the box office)…repeat business will be non-existent. Shapiro also set fire to Barbie dolls during a protest barbecue. The review of him has generated many online teasing (“They finally make a movie for 12” tall people with no genitalia and those people don’t even like it,” the comedy writer tweeted Jesse McLaren).

Texas Senator Ted Cruz accused the film of “kiss(ing) to the Communist Party of China because they want to make money selling the film in China” for including the “nine-dash line” on a map favoring China’s territorial claims over the South China Sea (yet he admits he hasn’t seen the film).

Podcaster Matt Walsh, who made the anti-trans documentary What is a woman?nicknamed Barbie “Most Aggressively Anti-Male Feminist Propaganda Party Ever Filmed.”

Ginger Gaetz, the wife of Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, has called for a boycott of Barbie by criticizing Ken’s “disappointingly low T” and “beta energy” by Gosling.

Yet the vast majority of Barbie viewers don’t seem to agree.

Barbie not only does it have a 90% positive critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, but a 90% positive audience score, resulting in a rare critical and viewership success for a title that isn’t a superhero film or an extension of a pre-existing film franchise. While Barbie he towered OppenheimerChristopher Nolan’s three-hour historical epic also performed well this weekend, delivering $82 million (and also, bizarrely, had a Rotten Tomatoes number — 94 percent — with the critics’ score exactly equal to the audience’s score).

In view of Barbie’Following the film’s release, the creative team and cast spoke about the decade-plus journey to bring the iconic doll to the big screen and their vision for the film Gerwig (which she co-wrote with partner Noah Baumbach) to be both a feminist and inclusive take on the toy brand.

Said Issa Rae, who plays President Barbie Time that the aim of the film is to portray a world in which there is no single ideal: “My concern was that it would seem too white feminist, but I think it is self-aware. Barbie Land is perfect, right? It represents perfection. So if perfection is just a bunch of white Barbies, I don’t know if anyone can accept that.