Eh, if anything, this shows that woke audiences are in fact willing to pay for woke products if they had a genuine interest in them from the start. We've seen what happens when all the "boy's club" franchises were changed for modern audiences, they either under-performed or flopped. The only success was Disney Star Wars, and even that fell off a cliff after Force Awakens. But Barbie? Apparently there's an audience for that after all. Hollywood can capitalize on this and profit from both sides of the political aisle.
The so-called progressives can have movies like this, while the rest of us can get all our franchises back. Win-win. If they still complain when "tOxIc mAsCuLiNiTy" and the "MaLe gAzE" come back, we can just tell them to piss off and watch more Barbie, and that our movies/games/shows weren't made for them. They have their stuff, and we have ours.
On the other hand, the anti-woke crowd seem to agree that Ken is the saving grace of this movie. Word-of-mouth claims that he was ironically the true protagonist and therefore the major reason Barbie is doing well. I can’t say for myself if that’s the case, but Ryan Gosling has been a meme generator for a while now, and modern writers clearly lack self-awareness among other things, so it’s certainly plausible.
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maul (1658)
a year ago
"while the rest of us can get all our franchises back"
You are being hopelessly optimistic, but wouldn't that be nice. I honestly think some of these people (Kathleen Kennedy for instance) would probably keep producing trash until the money's gone, instead of changing course. She really does seem that dense.
There's going to need to be serious changes within these companies if they want to start producing good products again. They need people who have the ability to understand fundamental concepts like what a "target audience" is, and what it wants. Instead of being no-talent, delusional hacks.
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