Billion-Dollar 'Barbie' Makes Baby Shapiro Feel Less Than 'Benough'
Why don't box office facts care about Ben Shapiro's feelings?
The Barbie movie — you might’ve heard of it — broke the billion-dollar threshold last weekend and shattered several records in the process. After just 17 days in theaters, Barbie is the fastest Warner Bros. film in the studio’s history to deliver a billion in ticket sales, outpacing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Pt 2 by two days.
A woman-led blockbuster with no Death Stars, wizards, or (Marvel) superheroes, Barbie is also the highest-grossing comedy of all time, easily dethroning both Home Alone ($285 million domestic) and The Hangover Part II ($586 million worldwide).
Greta Gerwig is the first solo woman director to reach this milestone. She’s also one of just 29 directors in total to do so.
Yes, Barbie is a sensation, despite a scathing review from professional idiot Ben Shapio, who dismissed the film as “one of the most woke movies I have ever seen” in a 43-minute YouTube tract. However, audiences don’t mind Barbie’s overtly feminist message. We dare say that Gerwig’s uncompromising vision is a key factor in the movie’s runaway success.
Shapiro, a failed screenwriter who’s still sore that he didn’t get a job on “The Good Wife,” is perfectly free to waste his time and money hate-watching Barbie, setting fire to Barbie dolls like a deranged person, and otherwise shouting at the rain. However, here’s how he wrapped up his unhinged anti-Barbie screed (not including video because you don’t deserve to hear that voice):
“Week one, this thing is gonna clean up at the the domestic box office. My prediction: [Barbie] is just absolutely going to fall off a cliff after [week one]. The repeat business on this movie is going to be nonexistent, because it was written by two people who are so smug and self-satisfied, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, that they have no audience.”
Shapiro is consistently wrong about everything. That’s not news. However, when predicting Barbie’s box office collapse, he defiantly ignored the most obvious evidence to the contrary. This is the same man behind the book and annoying right-wing meme Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings.
Even before Shapiro’s squeezed out his review, Barbie had opened to a positive reception from real movie critics. It’s “A” CinemaScore was consistent with the well-received Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. (CinemaScore is a market research firm that surveys audiences after they’ve just seen a film.) Big-budget movies that are heavily front-loaded in their opening weekends and then collapse afterward often aren’t reviewed for critics and/or have poor word of mouth. Neither was true of Barbie. The (likely) final Indiana Jones movie, Dial of Destiny, had a B+ CinemaScore, which accurately predicted its steep second weekend decline.
Besides, folks were showing up at sold-out Barbie screenings dressed in pink. You don’t need to like a movie to appreciate that it’s going to become an event.
Of course, Shapiro is incapable of humility or grace. When podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen rubbed his own words in his stupid face, Shapiro responded, “Totally true. I radically overestimated the taste of the American public. Guilty.”
He continued (because he always does), “Serves me right for forgetting my Mencken: ‘No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.’”
Shapiro is chronologically 39 but emotionally, he’s that obnoxious college freshman in your dorm who thinks he’s clever because he name-drops H.L. Mencken.
Here’s what Mencken actually wrote in a 1926 column:
No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
Mencken was specifically condemning the rise of tabloid newspapers — the Fox News and Daily Wire of his day. Of course, Shapiro understands irony about as well as he does movies.
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After I saw "Barbie", a man came up to me. A big man. With tears in his eyes. He said, "The patriarchy is dying. How am I going to get laid?" True story.
Barbie is a bona fide cultural event, and those record-breaking numbers are being led by women. That's what Captain DAP is mad about.
The night I went with Sister and Niece of Prickly the show we planned to see was sold out and we literally got the last three tickets for a show at another theatre. This was on a weeknight. There were women of all ages and ethnicities there dressed in pink (and a fair number of men), groups of women were taking pics of themselves before going in, and the mood in the crowd was giddy and effervescent. It's a movie that makes women happy. No wonder Ben hates it.