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The release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has become a historical event in modern cinema, emerging as a towering box office triumph across the globe, outshining its formidable rival, Oppenheimer, by a substantial margin. However, one major country failed to relate to the revolutionary film’s ideas despite critics singing its praises.
Barbie faced difficulty resonating with audiences across the Asian continent, as already anticipated by Warner Bros. But its performance at the South Korean box office, which is a burgeoning market, has turned out to be especially underwhelming.
The Hollywood Reporter delved into this curious outcome, with seasoned Seoul-based film critic and author Min Yong-Joon discerning that the film’s distinctively American underpinnings – interwoven with culturally nuanced humor – encountered difficulty translating into the Korean context. “The film had a very particular American context,” he commented.
There’s a lack of cultural nostalgia related to the iconic doll in South Korea, which ultimately led to the lukewarm reception of the film. Moon So-Young, a Seoul-based journalist and author, pointed out how the Korean people find themselves at a relative remove from the pervasive presence of Barbie dolls that have shaped the collective childhood of many Americans:
“We didn’t play with Barbie when we were growing up. We are familiar with Lego but not Barbie. Kids here these days don’t play with Barbie either. So there is no real fan base for Barbie in Korea.”
Kang-Hye-jung, the producer of one of the rare female-led hits in South Korea also used her insights into the audience’s watch habits to explain the lack of enthusiasm among South Korean viewers for Barbie:
“I couldn’t understand why Hollywood went so wild about Barbie, perhaps because it has never been ours. In general, people are so much more selective when they go to a movie nowadays. There is no such thing as a tentpole film anymore.”
Further speculations and research also brought to light how Barbie’s feminist themes and raging “smash the patriarchy” lessons were at risk of exhausting the Korean audience. Gender disparity and anti-feminist backlash are not uncommon in the country, and the discussions around female empowerment are “such a sensitive topic for the younger generation — the film’s main target — that they want to avoid it entirely.”
Kang Yu-jeong, a professor of Cultural Content at Kangnam University spoke on the matter, reasoning the box-office bombing around the huge gap between American and South Korean handling of gender discussions:
“Given how gender has been politicized and became a polarizing issue in Korea in the past few years, young people seem to be easily exhausted by discussions around gender.”
Kang also holds Barbie’s marketing team responsible for not being able to pull the right audience, since they “have been too careful around the feminist subject” that even the audiences who could have taken more interest in the film didn’t know what the film was about. “It was really in the gray zone,” he said.
The argument gains credibility when we read the reviews received by Barbie on South Korea’s largest film review portal, Naver, where male viewers gave the film only 5.99 scores out of 10. Users expressed their surprise and discomfort at the film’s feminist theme, evidenced by a user’s review that reads: “If you’re a guy, skip this one, it’s uncomfortable and feels like an educational film.”
But even though Barbie could not spark new debates around female empowerment in South Korea, female audiences made sure to express their delight at the film, rating it an average of 9.27 out of 10 on Naver. The cultural gap cannot be resolved, but the awkwardness and discomfort around feminism in the country can be eradicated in the long run. China stands as an example of the same, where Barbie gained popularity when the country’s feminists joined to see the movie and encouraged others to do the same.