Why is the ‘Barbie’ movie bombing in Japanese theaters?

Assuming that the "barbenheimer" effect is what made people shy away seems to miss the occam's razor possibility: It's really not a great movie.

Okay, maybe that was just my opinion. Let's back that up.

The Barbie movie is incredibly dependent on cultural tropes, and targets both the nostalgia bone with its Barbie references and the cultural feelings of American women of a certain age.

Yes, the movie was very popular here. Because it targeted a very specific, yet very large, audience. It seems incredibly likely to me that the simple explanation for it's low acceptance in Japan is simply that the very specific audience it appeals to is quite small in Japan.

An n=1 sample of "stayed away due to oppenheimer marketing" makes this an entirely useless article.

>But for the most part, it looks as if the “Barbie” movie’s celebration of diversity and the message of female empowerment will be overpowered by its association with the atomic bomb — and that the movie won’t have a positive, lasting impact in Japan. What a shame.

One possible angle was that Barbie's fantasy world is a product of a post-nuclear USA. I thought that maybe there was no Japanese love for this period in American history, but apparently, I was wrong:

https://japantoday.com/category/features/travel/Johnson-Town...

https://www.heddels.com/2014/07/japan-love-mid-century-ameri...

Although I suppose it's possible that opinions have changed since those times. Personally I don't really have any direct exposure to Japan, but I see the anti-American sentiment in works by some of my favorite people in their animation industry (Shirow Masamune, Kenji Kamiyama, Hayao Miyazaki).