Barbie almost had a fart opera in the middle but test audiences hated it

Barbie is continuing to dominate the box office. In just nine days, it crossed the $300 million mark, making it the fastest female-driven movie to do so domestically. Woo-hoo! I finally saw Barbie this weekend (without my kids) and loved it! It was a hot pink ball of fun and feelings. It was particularly awesome to see how many women were dressed in pink to celebrate the movie. There were even several men, including Mr. Rosie, who wore pink, too. I love when movies like this become a cultural event, you know? To have a nice thing to rally around in society during otherwise frustrating times.

*Mild spoilers ahead.* I’m around the same age as Greta Gerwig and played with Barbie dolls non-stop as a kid. I love how many Barbies (and Kens, Skipper, etc. al) were represented, and that even the end credits had more obscure ones. I loved America Ferrara’s speech, the musical montages, the Ken-off, the soundtrack, the existential questions it posed, and of course, the powerful overall message it had. Turns out, among all of those zany hijinks that went on in Barbieland, we could have had a fart opera!

If you watched “Barbie” and thought it was missing a proper fart joke, then you might’ve loved one scene that Greta Gerwig and editor Nick Houy left on the cutting room floor.

In a new IndieWire interview with the collaborators, it was revealed that “Barbie” had a “fart opera” in the middle of its runtime that got cut because it wasn’t received as well as Gerwig hoped.

“We’ve always tried to get in a proper fart joke and we’ve never done it,” Gerwig said. “We had like a fart opera in the middle [of ‘Barbie’]. I thought it was really funny. And that was not the consensus.”

“It was in the wrong place, too,” Houy added. “We need to work it into a more significant narrative moment next time.”

Houy has been the editor on all of Gerwig’s solo directorial outings, but “Barbie” presented unique challenges.

“[‘Barbie’] was so much more a comedy than ‘Lady Bird’ and ‘Little Women,’” Houy said about opening up more to the test screening process. “So we were just, like, ‘Let’s put it in front of people and see how they react.’ Everyone’s different and every screening’s different and we’ve definitely learned, over the years, that you really have to let things have their fair chance and then act accordingly. Once you know it’s dead, you have got to get it out of there.”

Whatever choices Gerwig and Houy made in the editing room as a result of test screenings appears to have paid off. “Barbie” has earned critical acclaim and is a box office powerhouse, soaring past the $200 million mark at the domestic box office in just five days. Its $162 million opening weekend is the highest ever for a female director.

[From Variety]

I would LOVE to know where that fart opera was supposed to happen, and its context. I wonder if was supposed to happen when the Kens were forming their Kendom? Was it a part of the Ken dance-off? Kate McKinnon seems like she’d be down for a fart opera, so maybe it was part of Weird Barbie’s story? Anyone have any ideas or theories? #ReleaseTheGerwigFartCut!

Oh, and just an aside for anyone else who is into this sort of thing like I am, when I Googled how old Greta Gerwig was, I realized that she has the same birthday as the Duchess of Sussex and President Obama, August 4. I just thought that was a neat bit of trivia.

Photos credit: Avalon.red, Backgrid and via Instagram

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