Within the world established by Barbie, Margot Robbie’s eponymous character, her fellow Barbies, the Kens and even Allan and Midge all hail from the brightly-colored Barbieland, where the houses don’t have any doors and walls, and there’s a complete lack of water, which has people on the internet freaked out. It’s never made clear whether Barbieland is part of Earth as we know it or resides in an alternate dimension, universe, etc. However, if we assume it’s the former, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson thinks he knows where it’s located.
Like so many moviegoers in the past few weeks, Tyson finally got in on the Barbenheimer phenomenon, i.e. went to the theater to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer. On the subject of that first movie, Tyson, a man who’s well known for ripping into movies like X-Men, Jurassic World and The Martian, instead put his analytical brain to use figuring out where Barbieland would be positioned on our planet, and he shared his findings on Twitter as follows:
In @BarbieTheMovie, the Moon's orientation places Barbie World between 20 & 40 deg North Latitude on Earth. Palm trees further constrain latitude between 20 & 30 deg. The Sun & Moon rose & set over the ocean. If it’s in the US, Barbie World lands somewhere in the Florida Keys.
Obviously when one applies logic to Barbieland, the whole thing falls apart, whether we’re talking about the elements mentioned earlier, the fact that none of its inhabitants age, the list goes on. Still, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a scientist first and foremost, so I don’t blame him for wanting to deduce Barbieland’s location. And to be fair, Margot Robbie’s Barbie and Ryan Gosling’s Ken did journey a long ways to get to the Venice Beach neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, so starting from the Florida Keys would account for all that time spent on the trek. Though that would then beg the question of why normal humans aren’t hanging out in Barbieland all the time, but that could be attributed to it being in a pocket dimension that’s occupies the same space as the Florida Keys, but vibrates at a different frequency… or we could simply not think too hard about this.
What is indisputable about Barbie is how successful it’s been. Even before its wide release, this comedy flick had earned a lot of positive reviews, but it’s now also proved itself as a commercial powerhouse. Barbie is now the second 2023 new movie release to cross $1 billion worldwide, following behind The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Obviously the hype for this movie won’t be dying down anytime soon, but it’s also been reported that Warner Bros. Pictures greenlighting Barbie 2 isn’t necessarily a sure thing given the deals that Robbie, Gosling and director/co-writer Greta Gerwig signed. But even if a sequel does end up moving forward, I wouldn’t count on any information being supplied that confirm or deny Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s deduction.
Once Barbie’s theatrical run is finished, it’ll likely be made available to stream with a Max subscription. In the meantime, you can look over the sublime details our own Riley Utley noticed watching Barbie a second time, or read the big issue that Tyson (and Elon Musk) had with a scene from last year’s Top Gun: Maverick.
