The Middle East is censoring “Barbie” over alleged LGBTQ+ content

The Middle Eastern premiere of Greta Gerwig’s feminist blockbuster Barbie has been delayed due to anti-LGBTQ+ censorship.

Vox Cinemas, the Middle Eastern movie theater chain, had initially planned to release Barbie on July 18, two days before its U.S. release. However, its release has been pushed back to August 31 so that the film’s U.S. distributor, Warner Bros., may finalize edits related to “alleged LGBTQ-related narration and dialogue” in the film, Variety reported.

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The suggested cuts have neither been publicly revealed nor approved by the film’s creators. It’s unclear what the cuts might be.

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The PG-13 film features transgender actor Hari Nef and lesbian comedian Kate McKinnon. It also demonstrates a campy sensibility, including a bright pink dream world filled with fashion-obsessed men and women. However, despite a low-brow joke in the trailer about two men threatening to “beach each other off” and a few queer-encoded minor characters, the film has very little overtly queer content.

In a July 30 tweet, the Saudi Arabian film and entertainment platform MovSto wrote that the film wouldn’t be shown in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), Egypt, and Bahrain. However, in an August 4 tweet, the platform wrote that the film would be shown in the U.A.E..

Warned Bros. hasn’t commented on the matter, but this wouldn’t be the first time that Middle Eastern censors have banned LGBTQ+ content from playing in regional cinemas.

Pixar’s 2022 animated Toy Story spinoff film Lightyear was banned from playing in Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait, and other West Asian nations because of a scene showing a lesbian kiss. Saudi Arabian audiences weren’t allowed to watch Marvel’s 2022 action-adventure film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness due to its inclusion of a same-sex female couple.

Other banned titles include the 2021 Marvel film Eternals which included a brief same-sex kiss, the 2021 musical drama West Side Story because of a transgender character, the 2019 space action film Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker because of a lesbian kiss in the background, and Disney’s 2017 live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast which featured a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “gay moment” of two men dancing at the film’s very end.

In the United States, the film has caused conservatives to lose their minds. One anti-LGBTQ+ broadcaster, Ben Shapiro, was so triggered by the film that he made a 43-minute “review” of the film in which he set fire to his Barbie dolls in protest.

Nevertheless, the film has gone on to make nearly a billion dollars at the box office, making it one of the highest-grossing female-led films made by a female director.