Celebrating 'Barbie' — and remembering the context of Hollywood

Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Now there's Billionaire Barbie.

Greta Gerwig's irrepressible movie about the doll has earned an estimated $1.03 billion at the box office, making her the first solo female director to have a movie top that stratospheric billion-dollar mark. And she did it fast — in just 17 days. The movie opened in the U.S. on July 21 and has crushed it at the box office ever since. Last weekend, domestically in ticket revenue "Barbie" beat "Oppenheimer," Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a giant prehistoric shark.

We exulted in 2017 when Patty Jenkins' "Wonder Woman," an action movie centered on a female star, Gal Gadot, earned $103 million in its debut weekend in the U.S., making it the best domestic opening ever by a woman director at the time. And we noted that it drew almost as many men as women into movie theaters. Surely this was proof to Hollywood studio heads that a woman director could make an action film about a woman and make a ton of money.

Or perhaps not. In the last 10 years, only three films with female directors — "Frozen," "Frozen 2" and "Captain Marvel" — have earned over $1 billion, and they had male co-directors.

Now, with "Barbie," Gerwig has not just broken every revenue record for a film by a woman director, she did it with an unapologetically fun, feminist and pink-lavished movie about a doll.

As reviews have noted, it both revels in and sends up the Barbie stereotype (actor Margot Robbie's magnificently Barbie-arched foot!) then dispatches her and a stowaway Ken on a journey from Barbie Land to real-life Los Angeles, where Barbie is shocked to learn sexism exists in, of all places, the boardroom of Mattel, the giant toy company that created her. (Mattel, of course, in real life stands to make money from this movie as well.)

It was the genius of Gerwig (who co-wrote it with her partner, writer/director Noah Baumbach) to create and direct a movie that is exuberant and tear-provoking in one sitting. Women of all generations have flocked to it in droves, many dressed in pink, from sequined skirts to cotton T-shirts. Some men are going as well. "Across social media, many women have been encouraging one another to use the movie as a litmus test to gauge whether their male dates can understand, or are at least receptive to, its feminist messaging," according to an NBC News story.

Pedro Nava, the chairman of California's Little Hoover Commission, even brought up "Barbie" during a meeting to discuss the state's challenge of caring for its aging population. Turns out he had seen the movie and was struck by the moment when Barbie — in real Los Angeles — sits on a bench next to a 91-year-old white-haired woman and tells her: "You're so beautiful."

The box office is beginning to rebound post-pandemic — "Barbie" is outranked this year so far only by "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," which has grossed more than $1.35 billion worldwide — but this is still a grim time in Hollywood. Writers and actors have been on strike against studios and streamers, and among their complaints is that studios are making tons of money but not sharing it fairly.

Things have improved for women in front of and behind the camera, but there's a long way to go to reach parity. The number of women at the helm of movies inches up at a snail's pace. Women accounted for just 18% of directors for the top 250 grossing domestic films in 2022, up 1% from 2021.

Only 11% of directors on the top 100 films of 2022 were women — and that was down a percentage point from 2021, according to the 2022 Celluloid Ceiling report by Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film in the School of Television, Theatre and Film at San Diego State University.

Meanwhile, four high-level diversity executives in Hollywood — all Black women — either resigned or were forced out of their jobs in late June.

Although Gerwig was already successful, having directed "Little Women" and "Lady Bird" — which earned her a nomination for a best director Oscar— this milestone puts her at the top in the hierarchy of Hollywood — a credit to her talent and a wake-up call to studios that diversity of talent isn't just good for publicity, but also the bottom line.