Photo:Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Barbieis the second-highest grossing film of the year, but not every country is loving theMargot Robbie-starring movie.
On Wednesday,multiple outletsreportedthat Kuwait has moved to banBarbiefrom playing in theaters after the country’s film censorship committee chairman Lafi Al-Subaie said Greta Gerwig’s comedy “[carries] ideas that encourage unacceptable behavior and distort society’s values.”
Kuwait’s ban of the film comes after Lebanon’s culture minister Mohammad Mortada also moved to restrictBarbiefrom screening across the country. He claimed the film “promoted homosexuality” and contradicted values related to faith and morality, according toReuters.
Mortada published an announcement asking Lebanon’s General Security agency, responsible for censorship decisions in the country, to take action to prevent the film from playing in theaters, the outlet reported.
Barbie, which features LGBTQ+ actors Scott Evans,Alexandra ShippandHari Nefin addition to leads Robbie, 33, andRyan Gosling, has also been banned in Vietnam for an entirely separate reason.
Warner Bros
On July 5, Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced it revokedBarbie’s license to play in theaters over aworld map displayed in the filmthat its government deemed offensive over a long-disputed maritime border with China, perNBC NewsandReuters.
“We do not grant license for the American movie ‘Barbie’ to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line,” a Vietnamese state-run newspaper reported on July 3, according to Reuters.
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“The map in Barbie Land is a whimsical, child-like crayon drawing,” Warner Bros. told NBC News in a statement in July. “The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the real world. It was not intended to make any type of statement.”
Robbie responded to fan theories that Ken (Gosling) is gay in an interview with British LBGTQ magazineAttitudeahead of the film’s release, in which she noted that whileBarbieis inclusive, all of the characters in Barbie Land “are dolls.”
“So, they don’t have actually have sexual orientations because they don’t have any reproductive organs, we figured,” she said at the time.
The film opened in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on Thursday after local censors suggested some edits to the film that delayed its originally intended release on July 21, asThe Hollywood Reporterreported. The outlet noted that it remains unclear whether parts of the film had been cut in order for it to release in those countries.
An official source toldReuterson Monday thatBarbiehad also been banned in Algeria, after the movie had been playing in theaters in the African country for weeks, because it “promotes homosexuality and other Western deviances” and “does not comply with Algeria’s religious and cultural beliefs.”
PerDeadline, the movie was banned in Algeria for “damaging morals,” citing private news organization 24H Algérie.
Barbieis in theaters across the U.S. now.
source: people.com
