Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway / Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Photos by Getty / Warner Bros.
It’s Barbie Week at The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, celebrating the doll’s pop-culture history, our favorite Barbie memories, and a certain major movie. Read all of our coverage here!
With all of the chatter regarding the Barbie movie for the last four years, the most pressing question has ended up being whether Greta Gerwig’s film could exceed the insurmountable hype surrounding it. There was an influx of candid set photos, multiple trailers and pre-release clips, and massively popular memes that quickly created a level of fatigue that was just as ubiquitous as the Barbie poster generator. Barbie was a sensation long before we were close enough to see the radiant pink glow of its looming July 21 release date. Surely, no matter how good the film was, it could never fully live up to that amount of sheer anticipation.
But to settle for tempered expectations is simply not the Barbie way. Barbie can be a doctor, a CEO, a politician, and even a damn mermaid. The sky’s the limit for Barbie—scratch that; she’ll become an astronaut and defy that restriction too. With all of these achievements under Barbie’s belt, who better to bring her story to the big screen than Gerwig? In her career as a writer and a director, Gerwig has crafted exceptional, singular films that brilliantly assess the subtleties of womanhood. No one is quite so adept at making the ultra-specific feel universal.