The Barbie Movie

This week’s column is – with apology – about the Barbie movie. But it is also – more pertinently – about overkill, and I can’t write about one without covering the other. For when it comes to publicity, is there ever such a thing as too much? And if the answer is ‘yes’, then how much is too much?

Almost too fittingly, the Barbie backlash started with J Smith Cameron, the actress who plays Gerry in Succession, who tweeted a very bold and Gerry-esque “is anyone else feeling bullied into being excited about the Barbie movie?” on July 8. Later, she clarified that while she expects to enjoy the film, “the marketing felt like a tsunami” and she felt “suffocated by the surplus pink”. 

Many Twitter users agreed. And that was even before someone had the bright idea to rename the Barbican tube station “Barbie-can”.

It’s over a year now that I’ve been fielding Barbie pitches: today alone, I’ve been told how to Barbie my living room, my sunglasses and (of course) my wardrobe. I am sick of pink. Sorry, PRs, but I don’t want to see another low res image of a pink accessory for a very long time. 

But I’m not sick of the Barbie movie. How can I be, when I haven’t even seen it? How can anyone be sick of a movie which has Ryan Gosling singing “I’m Just Ken”, a magnum opus written by Mark Ronson, with Slash on guitar, featuring the line “is it my destiny to live a life of blonde fragility?” So yes, there is such a thing as overkill. But when the product is likely to be as good as the Barbie movie, too much is never enough.