Did this weekend’s box office smash, Barbie, break the box office curse of Get Woke, Go Broke?
Well, let’s hope so! Seriously, let’s hope Hollywood believes woke sells and starts producing more woke movies because watching these movies flop is much more entertaining than anything Hollywood’s produced in years.
Granted, I haven’t seen Barbie, and I will never see Barbie because of the gay stuff. Still, the consensus from people I trust is that Barbie is a woke, two-hour piece of rich and famous broads whining about the patriarchy and hating on the same species (men) who won all the wars, dug all the coal, and built the country that made their luxury-crybabying possible.
Hey, have you noticed that feminist equity has nothing to do with women accepting their fair share of the dangerous and backbreaking work that keeps our world turning (plumbing, farming, engine overhauling, logging, commercial fishing, coal mining, climbing electric towers)? Remember this… A left-wing feminist’s idea of equity is wearing a business suit in an air-conditioned office.
Ever seen a girl up on a roof slinging shingles?
Yeah, me neither.
Ever seen a skirt trimming a tree?
Yeah, me neither.
Cry me a river, cupcakes.
Where was I?
Oh, yeah, the success of Barbie’s woke crybabying…
It could very well be that after woke’s 100 percent franchise-killing flop rate that Hollywood has figured out a way to thread the needle… To sell this agenda in a way that attracts crowds. I doubt it, but we’ll see. Here’s what I think happened, why Barbie is probably a unicorn…
Barbie didn’t sell itself as woke or political. It sold itself as candy-colored escapism and glamour, a girly-girl movie filled with beautiful people.
Barbie is not dumping all over what came before. No one had to fear that Luke Skywalker would be twisted into a misanthropic child killer or that Indiana Jones would get punched out by a homely, 75-pound Fleabag. Barbie is its own thing.
Barbie is a massively popular brand and has been for more than a half-century.
Barbie is an original movie. Like the three other box office hits of the year — Super Mario Bros., Oppenheimer, and Sound of Freedom — moviegoers appear to be suffering superhero/franchise fatigue in a big way. They want something new. The domestic underperformance of Mission: Impossible 7 tells us a lot.
The Barbie marketing campaign was brilliant and everywhere. After the costly failures of Shazam 2 and The Flash, Warner Bros. did this one right.
Make no mistake; Barbie is a massive-massive-massive hit, a cultural phenomenon. It opened bigger than Top Gun: Maverick ($127 million compared to $155 million), but Warner Bros. knew it had to hide the woke, had to bury the feminist crybabying, and sold it as something else entirely—as girly fluff.
This tells me Hollywood has finally conceded that woke equals box office poison. Now we will just have to see how long the industry gets away with more bait-and-switches or, as I mentioned above if Barbie becomes the secret recipe for successfully selling a crybaby ideology to the masses.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.