​Greta Gerwig Responds To Ridiculous Right-Wing Backlash Over 'Barbie'

While Barbie smashed the box office when it opened this past weekend, conservatives threw a fit about the candy-coated feminist film — something director Greta Gerwig hadn’t anticipated.

"Certainly, there's a lot of passion," the Little Women director told The New York Times when asked about the conservative backlash to her film. "My hope for the movie is that it's an invitation for everybody to be part of the party and let go of the things that aren't necessarily serving us as either women or men."

Gerwig continued, giving haters more grace than they likely deserve, "I hope that in all of that passion, if they see it or engage with it, it can give them some of the relief that it gave other people."

Despite right-wing pundits calling the movie “woke” and burning their Barbie dolls, the film made history by raking in $162 million in the U.S. and Canada during its opening weekend, making it the biggest movie of the year and the highest grossing woman-directed film of all time.

The film, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, among a huge supporting cast of other big-name stars, follows Robbie as the titular doll happily living in Barbie Land until she begins to question everything and has an existential crisis. Meanwhile, Gosling’s Ken falls under the spell of the patriarchy.

Right-wing political commentator (and professional troll) Ben Shapiro took to Youtube to post an overly-long video where he set one of the famous Mattel dolls on fire. "The basic sort of premise of the film, politically speaking, is that men and women are on two sides and they hate each other," he said. "And literally, the only way you can have a happy world is if the women ignore the men and the men ignore the women."

Shapiro also predicted that the movie would "fall off a cliff" at the box office — just one more thing the pundit was wrong about.

Ginger Gaetz, wife of Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, dressed in pink on the Barbie red carpet, but then called for a boycott of the film and wrote on Twitter that the film “neglects to address any notion of faith or family” and that it contained “disappointingly low T from Ken.”

Political pundit Matt Walsh called the movie "aggressively anti-man" and "feminist propaganda."

Conservative TV host Piers Morgan wrote an op-ed for the New York Post decrying the film’s feminist themes, "If I made a movie mocking women as useless dunderheads, constantly attacking the matriarchy, and depicting all things feminist as toxic bullsh--, I wouldn't just be canceled, I'd be executed.” He continued, "[Barbie] achieves exactly what it wanted to achieve and that is to establish the matriarchy as the perfect antidote to the patriarchy when in fact it's just the same concept that they asked us all to detest in the first place."

Regardless of the complaints from the right-wing mob, the film took in record-breaking numbers, and has received glowing reviews from critics and fans alike.

"I wanted to make something anarchic and wild and funny and cathartic, and the idea that it's actually being received that way, it's sort of extraordinary,” Gerwig told the NYT of the film's success.

Is it just us or are these criticisms from the right just making you love the movie more?