I will be kicking off Day 2 of PopCRN‘s conference You Can Be Anything” Imagining and interrogating Barbie in popular culture which starts tomorrow (26th March).

The conference is free to attend, just shoot PopCRN an email to get registered. The conference is taking place in EADT so make sure you check those time zones. I will be speaking at 10:15pm UK March 26th/9:15am EADT March 27th.

See you there and have a look at my abstract below:

On July 21, 2023, Barbie (2023) took in over $70mil at the box office in one day (Box Office Mojo, n.d.). Opening originally in 4,243 theatres across North America, Barbie continued to steamroller the box office by becoming the biggest opening weekend for a film directed by a woman (Guardian Staff and Agencies, 2023), outshining its release day counterpart Oppenheimer (2023) by almost double and quickly surpassing $1bil at the box office in just over two weeks (Bushard, 2023). The success of Barbie can be accredited to several elements:
cast, crew, director, writers, and subject matter. Yet, what is not highlighted here and often overlooked, are the fans and how their practices led to it smashing box office records. Henry Jenkins notes that “fans actively assert their mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions” (ibid: p.24). Thus, fans and cinema-goers have extended the success of Barbie outside of the box office by manipulating the text into real-life and online fan practices. Barbie ‘yassified’ cinemas, creating perfect backdrops to capture selfies whilst dressed in pink
for Instagram. Kurt Lancaster’s theory of interfaces (2001) is particularly interesting in relation to the Barbie box marketing campaign across UK and US cinemas. Fans were encouraged to pose inside the box as if they themselves were a Barbie doll. The marketing for Barbie was built for the social media age and encouraged fans to interact with interfaces and then post about them on social media, furthering the reach of the marketing by turning it into both a real life and online fan practice.
Online, Barbie became an instant hit even before its release, offering fans a plethora of content to turn into new online texts (memes, gifs, viral trends such as ‘my Ken’s job is’). Fans created viral trends that were complementary to the film in the form of memes, gifs, ‘mash ups’ with other texts (‘Barbenheimer’ with Oppenheimer, ‘I am Kenough’ Kendall Roy from Succession (2018-2023). When the cast was announced, the ‘This Barbie is’ selfie generator went viral, allowing people to create their own versions of the film announcement and ‘become an instant icon!’ (Barbie Selfie Generator, n.d.) to then share it on social media.
Barbie invited not just children or adults who are experiencing nostalgia to play, but everyone to partake in its ‘plastic is fantastic’ lifestyle.
This paper explores the ways in which the film invited fans to play with the text in a way that is reminiscent of playing with dolls as a child. It will analyse online and real life fan practices surrounding the release of this film and how they aided its success at the box office by extending the text through social media.