The first teaser trailer for the Barbie movie officially landed today, and while fans expected big pop art and colorful costumes, no one could have predicted that the teaser would begin with a stunning homage to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the beginning of the trailer, narration by Helene Mirren recounts how the only thing that young girls had to play with dolls, but “always and forever, baby dolls…until.” Just like the Monolith appearing among the ape-men at the beginning of 2001, Barbie appears to inspire young girls to throw away their dolls and transcend to a higher plane of existence. Perhaps even more unexpected than this, the official Stanley Kubrick account noticed it.
Run by The Stanley Kubrick Estate, the account retweeted the Barbie trailer and added: “They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! Even Barbie is a Kubrick fan…” Fans of Kubrick and Barbie were quick to flock to the tweet, not only noting that they thought the filmmaker was dead (he passed in 1999) but because it validates the Barbie movie even more. There were a lot of hilarious reactions to the Kubrick tweet, some of which you can find below.
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The Greta Gerwig-directed movie has had a tremendous amount of hype leading into it thanks to the set photos, but the first footage has only pushed the hype train full speed ahead. Barbie hits theaters on July 21, 2023.
