I think Barbie made a lot of people feel very seen and that’s very rare, especially as a woman. That really resonated and traveled the world.
—Billie Eilish, Oscar-winning songwriterMost Picture 2024: Billie Eilish, FINNEAS and several passionate audience members on the rewatchability of Barbie
In an annual tradition, we round off awards season by crowning our Most Picture. Ella Kemp hears from many passionately addicted Letterboxd members, along with Oscar-winning songwriters Billie Eilish and FINNEAS, on the eternal rewatchability of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
It was the summer of Barbie. Then it was the year of Barbie. Thanks to Ryan Gosling, it was the Oscars of Barbie. And now, Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie’s record-smashing, pink-loving hit wakes up wearing the Most Picture 2024 crown, as the 96th Academy Awards Best Picture nominee that Letterboxd members have rewatched the most.
It should come as no surprise, considering that Barbie was the fastest film in Letterboxd history, at the time of writing, to join the One Million Watched Club—just eleven days after it was released in cinemas worldwide. And while we’re at it, the quickest to join the Two Million Watched Club, 95 days after release. That’s 400 days faster than the previous record, held by The Batman.
To this day, Barbie has been watched by more than three million Letterboxd members, liked by almost two million, and added to the four favorites of 26,000-plus people. It’s perfectly normal for certain members to have racked up thirteen, sixteen, twenty, even 30 rewatches. Carly Richard sums it up: “i’m rewatch barbie. my job is rewatch. not to be confused with ‘i absolutely love the barbie movie’ barbie. common misconception.”
“I never expected to not like this film—the cast was an Avengers: Endgame-type situation for me,” says Pui Kuan, a 23-year-old Letterboxd member based in London who has logged Barbie 30 times on the app. (My favorite thing about her stats is that her most rewatched runner-up is in fact our 2023 Most Picture winner, Top Gun: Maverick, with nineteen rewatches.) “I knew I was addicted from the first watch,” she tells me, “because that same day I was looking at when was the next time I could make it [to the cinema], and booked it. Special shoutout to the BFI Southbank for (affordably) hosting me 4 times!”
Pui Kuan isn’t alone in her easy embrace of Barbie off-the-bat. 26-year-old Texan Lissy, whose Letterboxd profile image features a photo of a young Ryan Gosling and whose X profile image features Margot Robbie in her pink, Stereotypical Barbie boiler-suit chic, writes to me that this is only the beginning of the obsession for her. “I’ve always been a big fan of Margot, Ryan and Greta so to have them all come together to create something was basically the epitome of dangling keys in front of a baby. Twenty is a low number in my opinion, even though that’s the most times I’ve watched any movie. I don’t think I’ve seen Barbie (k)enough times yet.”
For Lewis, who has seen Barbie sixteen times in theaters, the love affair goes back to his childhood. “Being so isolated at school, Barbie existed as a light at the end of the tunnel—even as a boy, despite how sadly controversial that was to say back then,” he says. “I was able to be free. To play, to grow. To be exactly who you wanted to be without any inhibitions.”
That desire aligns with Gerwig and Robbie’s multiversal design for the first live-action Mattel movie, in which Robbie’s Barbie is but one of many. It’s this key detail, I think, that speaks to it being our logical winner of this year’s Most Picture: is it really possible to process and appreciate every Barbie (and every Ken! And Allan!) with just one viewing? One must return to Barbie Land again and again. It’s what Matthias did—he, like Lewis, acknowledges that he regularly heads back to theaters to rewatch movies that worked for him the first time around, but there was something specific about his experience with Barbie.
“I have probably seen a lot of different versions of Barbie,” the 30-year-old from Berlin tells me. “Sometimes the film changes, sometimes I change. Different theater, different screen, different seat, different time, different audience. I liked some trips to the cinema more than others.” And each time, something different: “I look forward to every time Charli XCX’s ‘Speed Drive’ kicks in, and am completely overwhelmed when Billie Eilish’s thoughts take the film to a whole new level. The way Margot Robbie says, completely dejected, ‘I don’t control the railways or the flow of commerce,’ or the way Ryan Gosling’s Ken says ‘Mattel!’ as if he had made a great discovery and was now wondering what to do with it. There are thousands of these little moments I love.”
These details were not taken for granted by the film’s makers, either, as Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell tell the Letterboxd crew soon after winning their second Academy Award, for Barbie’s central thematic song ‘What Was I Made For?’. Asked what they put the passionate Letterboxd rewatch-response down to, O’Connell replies: “I think it’s down to a lot of things. A lot of people went into that movie expecting to see a spectacle and they expected to laugh, but I think Greta and Margot brought a lot more to that. When we went in to think about writing a song for Barbie, we thought, ‘Oh, this is so much more than we thought we were going to see.’ We were so moved by it.”
Eilish adds: “I think it made a lot of people feel very seen, and that’s very rare, especially as a woman. That really resonated and traveled the world: feeling seen and heard.”
For Letterboxd member Lissy, the Barbie era has graduated to a Barbie lifestyle; she cannot hear Richard Strauss’s ‘Also sprach Zarathustra, Op.30’ without thinking of the film, rather than its opening scene’s earlier inspiration. “I recently heard the 2001: A Space Odyssey opening theme in a commercial and I thought Barbie was playing,” she admits. The film, which undoubtedly uses the theme to great effect, may well have changed the fabric of Lissy’s life in the way Kubrick’s sci-fi opera did for many other film lovers. “I would go straight to the cinema after work to watch Barbie as I work right across from a Cinemark,” she says. “When it hit its barbilion dollars at the box office, like a third of that was probably my doing.”
The question of box office has a place in the Most Picture conversation: you don’t make a billion dollars without breaking a few (Letterboxd) eggs (popularity records!). Barbie opened in cinemas in July 2023, giving us three long months of theatrical screenings before coming to digital three months later, and only landed on streaming in December (on Max in the US). In an “endless summer of going to the movies,” as Matthias calls it, our only option was to see Barbie surrounded by fellow Barbies, whose pink outfits Pui Kuan kept tabs on for weeks. Naturally, the box office followed suit.
“If the film hadn’t been released in theaters, I probably wouldn’t have seen it so often,” Matthias admits. “To be honest, I haven’t watched it since it disappeared from theaters. I am not yet ready to overwrite my cinema experience with a streaming experience.” He nods to other films that previously sparked this kind of enthusiasm for him, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Christian Petzold’s Afire. “It’s something that the pandemic has triggered very strongly in me. Suddenly, cinema was no longer something I took for granted. Now I don’t want to miss a chance to see the movies I love, and all the others for that matter, on the big screen.”
While Academy members awarded Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer the greatest trophy haul at the 96th Oscars, with just one going to Barbie from its eight nominations, “the ‘Heimer’ element of this double feature meant very little to me!” Lewis admits. “Though I did come to respect that movie, Barbie is the phenomenon. Because the August lineup was so, dare I say it, weak, I found myself returning to Barbie every few days for that serotonin boost. It makes my day just that little brighter.”
That impact cannot be taken for granted, nor can the 1.5-billion-dollar box office and the rewatchability data. Lewis adds: “I think it’s very very easy to look back on Barbie and think of it as a shoe-in for a guaranteed success. But that wasn’t the case. I don’t think how risky this movie was to get off the ground should be overlooked.” Shout-out to both Gerwig and Robbie as producers, without whom we wouldn’t be having any of these conversations.
But what of Barbie now it’s no longer summer, no longer 2023, and—although they said the day would never come—no longer awards season? How will these shades of pink continue to pop? “The Barbie movie was so powerful that I literally came back to [Twitter] and made a stan account, just so I could talk about the movie with someone,” says Lissy. Pui Kuan hasn’t planned her next rewatch just yet, but also knows it’s coming. “The film is timeless. It brings me pure joy every time I get to escape to Barbie Land for two hours.”
Matthias is also toying things up, but also knows the possibilities are endless—just as Barbie has always told us they could be. “It was a very specific time, a very specific feeling. Like an era I can return to at any time. But I definitely hope there will be an opportunity to see the film again soon. After all, there are so many people I would love to share it with.” It’s not “Bye, Barbie!” It’s “see you again, soon”.
‘Barbie’ is now streaming worldwide courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
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