Barbie is upon us. Greta Gerwig’s hotly anticipated take on the iconic toy has surfed a wave of hype into theaters and lived up to its promises. It’s sitting pretty at 89% on the Tomatometer, is set to demolish Oppenheimer, and with a healthy $20 million preview screening haul may yet join the billion-dollar club.
But some people are determined to ruin the party. So, who would really have an axe to grind against an upbeat and satirical movie with a strong lead female character and some things to say about patriarchy? Hey, wait, what’s that unwashed smell coming from over the hill? Oh no, the incels are coming!
A surprising number of bearded middle-aged men appear to have grumpily turned up on the opening night of Barbie to hate-watch it, immediately taking to the internet to post unhinged screeds.
Don’t threaten us with a good time:
We don’t need to read the seventeen(!) tweets in this thread to know where this is going…
A great pull quote for the poster:
Wow, a whole hour of a furious guy in his forties screaming about Barbie and feminism! Who could resist?
Sadly for these goons, Barbie appears unassailable, so they’ve retreated to the one tiny place they have any power. Yup, it’s the IMDB rating, where there appears to be a concerted effort to review-bomb it into oblivion:
As you’d expect, the negative user reviews revolve around Barbie‘s feminism, blaming it for “falling birthrates”, a crumbling society, that “Joseph Goebbels would be proud”, and that it encourages the “feminist matriarchy”.
It’s been said a million times before, but these are people that definitely need to get away from their computers and touch grass. Jeez.
Barbie is now in theaters.