As The Star And Co-Producer Of 'Barbie', Margot Robbie Will Reportedly Make FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS Off The Smash Hit Movie
Get that bag, Margot Robbie. Very well-deserved. I don't want to diminish her feminist power by saying she Babe Ruth'd Barbie to bank a billion bucks at the box office, but I'm a sports-minded simpleton who can't think of a better analogy. So yeah, Robbie naturally got a nice little back-end deal of the BO cut, in addition to a hefty leading-lady salary. Well-done.
Good on Robbie for delivering this wild-ass, multilayered, incredible story based on a Mattel doll to the silver screen. Amid all the uncertainty in the aftermath of COVID, the skepticism around the moviegoing experience as a sustainable business model and, oh yeah, sharing a release date with Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, nobody at Warner Bros. flinched. The Kenergy and Barbie held strong. And now it's the biggest hit in a long, long time when movies so desperately needed it.
Some folks at this company — some MEN — don't seem to grasp the deeper layers of the film. Like how it's not just a pure feminist utopian propaganda hit piece that's as straightforward and lacking nuance as, "WHAT IF WOMEN RAN SHIT THOUGH?"
There's quite a bit of commentary on masculine vulnerability and how much of a struggle that can be. Ryan Gosling absolutely nails this in his instantly iconic himbo role as Ken. If this man doesn't get an Oscar nomination, he deserves, like, a medal or a gold star from Barbie for his psuedo-meta-Ken performance on the press tour alone.
Yes, the patriarchy is deconstructed, exposed and made into a parody of itself in Barbie, yet within that, there's something profoundly sad and empty about Ken, the "newfound" ideology's ringleader in Barbie Land. He has an emotional catharsis toward the end of the film that's played for mostly for laughs but resolves in such a satisfying way and highlights how much of a bizarre identity crisis the mere concept or preconceived notions about masculinity can create for the modern man.
Without getting too into the weeds and winding up with a 2,000-word thinkpiece blog about a movie everyone's already dissected to varying degrees of depth, suffice it to say there's more to Barbie than what's on the surface. How fitting for the toy itself! And in the case of Margot Robbie, she had a nice little bonus waiting for her when she correctly called her shot that Barbie would cross the billion-dollar mark. Which it easily has.
Oh, you wanted some Margot Robbie-related smut? Ehhhhhhh. Here she is in-character, is that good enough?
Y'all can't tell me Simu Liu's Ken ain't sexy too.