(ConservativeSense.com) – The Barbie movie is spending another week at the world’s top spot. The film opened in the US on the weekend of July 22 and took in more than $155 million, making it the most significant box office success this year. It continued its dominance into its second weekend and earned over $93 million, making it one of the biggest second-weekend successes of all time. Outside the United States, the film has made over $770 million in its first two weeks, making it the biggest worldwide hit of 2023.
Amid criticisms of “wokeness,” Barbie has bucked the recent trend that saw various movies flop. Over the past year or so, Disney has lost more than $300 million on animation projects that tanked at the box office due to their left-leaning and overt political messaging. Strange World, for example, lost $197 million and became notorious for depicting a teen gay relationship. Similarly, Elemental, which sought to reflect the experience of immigrants, failed to connect with audiences.
Criticism of Barbie has turned into a clash between the political left and right. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, for example, said it was “angry feminist claptrap,” which led hosts of The View, Whoopi Goldberg and Alyssa Farah Griffin, to mock Shapiro and others, saying they are out of touch and are taking the movie too seriously.
Meanwhile, a Japanese company has complained about the amalgamation of the titles of Barbie and Oppenheimer, a second smash hit released the same weekend. The two movie titles have been combined online, and the opening weekend is referred to as Barbenheimer. Japan said the co-marketing of the films makes a mockery of nuclear conflict and the devastating attacks it endured at the end of the Second World War. Oppenheimer tells the true story of the physicist who invented the atomic bomb that would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Neither movie has yet received a release date in Japan.
Copyright 2023, ConservativeSense.com
