Now that Barbie is making a big pink splash on theater screens this week, some moviegoers are remembering another Warner Bros. movie with a strikingly similar plot and message that came out just last year.
The Olivia Wilde-directed Don’t Worry Darling wasn’t necessarily a box office failure, per se, but it did have a much more lukewarm critical reception than Barbie now has. Barbie boasts an impressive “Certified Fresh” 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes while Don’t Worry Darling is “Rotten” at 38 percent.
What is remarkable is how similar the two movies are in plot and themes. Both are feminist tales of a blonde protagonist escaping an artificial world to enter the “real world” in order to get to the bottom of why she has been feeling so strange in her day-to-day life. And both films arguably make a statement about the patriarchy and its grip on women. But one is a bubble-gum-colored comedy and the other is a David Lynch-like thriller.
Moviegoers were not lost on the similarities.
One Barbie fan even proclaimed it to have the superior “feminist commentary” compared to Don’t Worry Darling.
Even the vehicles and settings from both films bear a rather jarring similarity.
Indeed, it was the conclusion of one commentator that Barbie actually achieved “what Don’t Worry Darling thought it was doing.”
I haven’t seen Barbie yet but now I’m extra curious to see how it compares to Don’t Worry Darling, a movie that I didn’t outright hate but didn’t quite win me over either, mostly due to what I thought was a somewhat silly twist at the end.
Barbie comes to theaters on July 21.