Warner Bros. is rubbing its hands with the more than billion dollars Barbie has taken in at the international box office, but it is clear that the film about the iconic Mattel doll directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie also has its detractors, especially in the Middle East, where its release has been censored in countries like Lebanon and Kuwait.
The controversy over the marketing of the film has already jumped previously in Japan due to the memes that emerged on social networks due to the Barbenheimer phenomenon -the simultaneous release in theaters of Barbie and Oppenheimer, by Christopher Nolan- that showed Robbie's Barbie with actor Cillian Murphy's Oppenheimer alongside images of nuclear explosions. "If a Barbenheimer-derived illustration or art were to be created, it shouldn't be of Barbie feasting on a nuclear mushroom," actor Koji Maruyama told the Change.org website, which collected more than 16,000 signatures demanding the removal of the label.
The Japanese nation has accused Warner Bros of frivolizing with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to promote a film that has nothing to do with those disastrous events. The company immediately removed the post and apologized. At the moment, neither of the two films has reached Japanese theaters.
On the other hand, Barbie has managed to overcome censorship in countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia -the region's main market- and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where it opens this Thursday with the recommendation "for people over 15 years of age", and after receive the go-ahead after weeks in which local censors suggested edits for the film, but it will not be seen in Lebanon or Kuwait, and Egypt doubts whether it will premiere on August 30 as planned.
The feminist comedy was set to land in theaters in the Middle East on July 19, two days before it hit theaters around the world. But it was not like that and the dates began to dance in each country in the area, fueling rumors of a possible ban on Barbie for dealing with issues related to the LGTBI movement and questioning the traditional family, values that are inconsistent with those they promote. Muslim-majority countries in the region.
The Lebanese Minister of Culture, Mohamed Murtada, alleged that he ordered the film to be banned, considering that it "promotes homosexuality" and encourages "the ugly idea of refusing custody of the father, belittling the role of the mother and ridiculing it, questioning the necessity of marriage and start a family."
And in Kuwait, the country's authorities announced that they have prohibited the screening of "Barbie" as a measure of "protection of social traditions and public ethics", believing that the ideas that this film spreads are "alien" to the society of the small gulf country. The controversy continues, but that does not seem to affect the triumphant trajectory of the film in the rest of the planet. Warner Bros. can continue to rub its hands.
