Over the weekend, Greta Gerwig painted the world pink.

If you were in the vicinity of a cinema last Friday, unofficially christened ’Barbenheimer Day’ to honour the concurrent release of Gerwig’s Barbie movie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (two films that couldn’t be more tonally disparate), you’ll have seen them: the (predominantly female) groups of friends queuing up, dressed up to celebrate Barbie’s big screen debut.

Many opted for various shades of fuchsia, rose, blush and bubblegum, others took outfit inspiration from the dolls they played with as kids and some wore slogan T-shirts purchased especially for the occasion, such as Girls On Tops’ Greta Gerwig T-shirt (which was available for a limited time in a special pink wash in order to celebrate all things Barbie) or Barbenheimer mash-up designs.

Gerwig’s third solo directorial effort has already proved to be a box office smash. In North America, Barbie earned $155 million (£120m) in ticket sales, overtaking The Super Mario Bros Movie and every Marvel film released in 2023 to become the biggest movie opening of the year so far.

International ticket sales brought in $182 million (£142m), too, taking the global total up to $337 million (£263m) – that’s the biggest-ever debut for a film with a female director.

It’s a seriously impressive feat, and although there is yet to be a breakdown of cinemagoers by gender, anecdotally at least it seems like ‘the girlies’ came out to support Greta and Margot Robbie, who served as the film’s executive producer as well as starring as Barbie, in droves.

Seeing a female director break a box office record is always seriously heartening. Women are vastly under-represented behind the camera: the annual Celluloid Ceiling report recently found that in 2022, women made up just 24% of directors, writers, producers, editors and cinematographers working on that year’s top 250 grossing films. The situation is even worse for women of colour. In 2021, USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that they had accounted for less than 2% of all top-grossing directors since 2007.

But there’s another reason why Barbie feels like a cause for celebration. According to social media, there was a real sense of camaraderie between female cinemagoers too, greeting one another with a cheerful “Hi Barbie!” – just like Margot’s version of the plastic fantastic doll hails her equally plastic pals in the film. 

“Every pink-covered woman at this theatre greeted one another with enthusiastic ‘Hi Barbies!’ and I feel like I have transcended from this plane to a feminist dreamscape,” one Twitter user wrote, summing up the prevailing mood.

Barbie’s position in pop culture has long been a controversial one. For every fan that argues that she’s quietly radical, never marrying and always career-focused (she’s run for president, walked on the moon and learned to code), a critic will bring up the indisputable fact that she has, until recently, represented an extremely narrow beauty ideal: one that’s white, blonde and thin. And who could forget the fact that, if she was brought to life, her exaggerated proportions would mean that she would have to walk on all fours and wouldn’t be able to lift her head?

Both Barbie the doll and Barbie the movie won’t appeal to everyone. Yet despite the heroine’s complicated status – and the ambivalence you might feel about helping a mega-brand make even more money – there’s undoubtedly something heartening about seeing groups of women brought together by the Barbie phenomenon. 

The movie has created a moment of shared, silly joy – something that adulthood often lacks. “My takeaway from Barbie (and Taylor [Swift]) is that we are starving for community and shared experiences,” the author Ally Carter wrote on Twitter. “Calling out ‘Hi Barbie!’ and exchanging friendship bracelets with strangers shows that we are not alone,” she added. “We can still love – and experience – things together. And we’ve needed that.” 

Carter’s comparison between Barbie-mania and Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, which has seen fans dress up to mark Swift’s various incarnations and swapping friendship bracelets with one another in a gesture of togetherness – is an interesting one. Both are cultural events catering unabashedly to a majority female audience, giving those women space to celebrate the interests and enthusiasms that they might have previously been told were cheesy, cringe or stupid.

Whether it’s the toys we played with until their plastic heads popped off or the songs we used to sing in our bedrooms, the stuff that young women like isn’t always taken seriously. It certainly doesn’t often inspire mega-budget movies, despite the fact that a new Marvel film seems to roll around every couple of months. Here’s hoping that Barbie might change that – by proving that there’s a huge appetite for funny, clever films about girlhood. 

Images: Warner Bros.