‘I thought it was really funny. And that was not the consensus’: Strangely enough, studio executives weren’t sold on ‘Barbie: The Fart Opera’

Having passed $500 million at the global box office in less than a week, Barbie has more than lived up to the hype that it would be a cinematic sensation like no other. However, would it have been more or less successful had Greta Gerwig been granted the opportunity to load up on farts?

It sounds ridiculous – and it very much is – but it’s an entirely true story that the Academy Award-nominated filmmaker lauded for her socially-conscious and incendiary dramas wanted her Mattel adaptation to feature a full-blown “fart opera” for no other reason than to amuse herself.

Funnily enough, though, Gerwig admitted during a podcast appearance with IndieWire that she might have been the only person to have found the cacophony of flatulence to be side-splittingly hilarious, because for some reason it didn’t seem to play the same way with the executives at Warner Bros.

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

Editor and regular collaborator Nick Houy remains confident that one of Gerwig’s projects will eventually feature the fabled fart opera, but it’s case of unleashing the gas at the opportune moment for maximum dramatic impact.

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

If there’s ever a sequel, then it’s best to expect at least one fart if not significantly more, which is a sentence every bit as unusual as it sounds.