Pink Money

The illogic of gendered capitalism

This past weekend, the Barbie movie opened around the world and the box office numbers are already in. The movie grossed $337 million worldwide, and became the biggest opening weekend box office for a film based on a toy.

The movie outperformed its opening weekend competitor, the film Oppenheimer. And it also outperformed historical top draws, such as Top Gun, Toy Story, and even Super Mario Brothers. In the US, 65% of Barbie’s audience was female and 81% of audience members were younger than 35.

The most common take on the huge box office success of the Barbie movie around the world is that it is proof positive that women do have disposable income, and are not only willing, but actually want, to spend it on things that are made for women or of interest to women.

The prevailing theory in Hollywood has been for a very long time that films made specifically for female audiences lose money. The problem, of course, is that when this theory is trotted out, the films being used to measure this bar by, tend to be sappy dramas or romcoms, and not very good ones at that.

That hasn’t stopped this theory being used to justify the types of movies that do typically get made: male-actor led heist films, action films, sci fi films, war films, westerns, male-oriented films based on…