Barbie, based on the eponymous line of dolls from Mattel, will finally arrive on the big screen later this month. The film has been a long time in the making, with many several directors, screenwriters, and Amy Schumer involved with the project at some point.
The film has generated a lot of positive buzz online, but then it has also generated a few negative ones. One of these is its ban from Vietnamese theaters by the country’s National Film Evaluation Council.
The decision was announced a few days ago by Vi Kien Thanh, the head of the Vietnam Cinema Department. This is where the country determines whether a foreign film is fit for the country’s theaters and should receive a license or if it should be censored.
If you are curious as to why the Southeast Asian country banned Barbie, it is because the film features a disputed map of the South China Sea.
This map, created by China, validates Chinese territorial claims over a large portion of the South China Sea, which Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei, and Malaysia dispute. In 2016, an international tribunal at The Hague sided with these countries against China, but that hasn’t stopped the country from doing as it sees fit.
In his rejection of Barbie, the state-controlled newspaper Tuoi Tre quoted Kien Thanh as saying, “We do not grant licence for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line.”
This is not the first time that Vietnam will ban a film from its theater over the inclusion of the disputed map and the nine-dash line. Just last year, the country placed a similar ban on the Tom Holland-led Uncharted. The year before, it was the DreamWorks animated feature film titled Abominable.
With these occurrences, we can’t help but wonder whether the map’s inclusion was intentional on the part of the film’s production team.
Given Vietnam’s record, we believe that, at the very least, one person should have figured out how Vietnam would react. Perhaps, the film’s production team chose to appease China instead with the map’s inclusion and, as a result, guarantee entry into the country’s better spending power and its larger base of cinemagoers.
By the way, Warner Bros. Pictures has been marketing the film aggressively ahead of its release later this month. Among other initiatives, we know the studio partnered with Microsoft, which will give away Barbie-themed Xbox Series S consoles to lucky winners.
If you fancy the themed console, then keep your eyes peeled for the sweepstakes starting on July 10 for an opportunity to win it for yourself.
By the way, one of Hollywood’s biggest action stars, Tom Cruise, is a Barbie fan. And he already has a plan for watching the film.
Barbie will waltz into theaters on July 21.
