Sanctions-Hit Russia Using Pirated Copies of Barbie with ‘Pop-Up Gambling Ads’ in Theaters

The Moscow Times reported on Wednesday that illegal copies of the international blockbuster hit film Barbie have begun appearing in Russian movie theaters despite American sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine.

The Times cited a report on the Russian network RTVI that found Barbie screenings in Siberia, using copies a film critic described as “shitty” as the audience had to endure “pop-up gambling ads” interrupting the movie and poor dubbing into Russian. The ads indicated the movie was downloaded from an illegal pirating website and aired on a projector in the film’s theaters, rather than being obtained in a legitimate way.

According to the report, the organizers of the outdoor screenings of the movie in Siberia claimed they were engaging in “perfectly” normal attempts to meet demand, but vowed to find better quality versions of future movies with fewer pop-ups blocking the screen.

“We just want to show movies and provide access to some entertainment in these harsh realities we’re in,” one organizer said.

Barbie, based on the classic Mattel doll, is expected to become the biggest Hollywood hit of 2023, surpassing $1 billion in cumulative box office sales around the world this week and becoming the first film directed by a lone woman, Greta Gerwig, to achieve that milestone. It made $162 million on its opening weekend and has continued to post strong numbers around the world. It has nonetheless triggered a variety of bizarre controversies around the world, from being banned in Vietnam over a map that appeared to support illicit Chinese claims in the South China Sea to facing the wrath of angry Japanese viewers for online promotions tying the film to Oppenheimer, the biopic about the eponymous nuclear weapons developer that opened on the same weekend.

Sales of tickets for the bootleg copy viewing of Barbie in Tyumen, Siberia, do not count towards the film’s box office totals.

File/Toy Barbie doll sets sit on display inside the Detsky Mir PJSC children’s goods store on Znamenka street in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, Jan. 28. 2017. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Moscow Times noted that appetite for American films in Russia has continued to persist despite sanctions from the West and restrictions on Western entertainment by the regime of strongman Vladimir Putin. Barbie is far from the only victim of illegal distribution in the country.

“Russian film distributors adopted an illicit scheme last year by obtaining digital copies of movies shown in Kazakhstan via the messaging app Telegram — without permission from copyright owners,” the Moscow Times detailed. “Hollywood companies have since cracked down on Russia’s bootleg film distribution, initially preventing the country from experiencing the global frenzy of Barbie and Oppenheimer, the Vedomosti business daily reported in July.”

Hollywood abandoned Russia in the wake of Putin announcing a “special operation” to oust democratically elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2022. Since then, it has become a status symbol in the American entertainment industry for celebrities to visit Kyiv and take photos with Zelensky in solidarity, or at a minimum host virtual chats with the president – himself a former comic actor. Ben Stiller, Jimmy Fallon, and Jessica Chastain are among Zelensky’s VIP engagements. Radical leftist Sean Penn left his Academy Award in Kyiv with Zelensky during a visit in November. David Letterman received an Emmy Award nomination in July for his interview with Zelensky in Kyiv for his program My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.

That robust support has apparently not diminished the appetite for American entertainment in Russia, where Putin has struggled to contain anti-war protests and silence his own famous figures on the matter. Barbie‘s popularity there comes in contrast to several nations seek to censor the film for a variety of reasons. In Vietnam, the communist government banned screenings of the film because a map of the world appearing in it seemed to include a depiction of the “nine-dash line,” a fictional border the government of China uses to claim vast swathes of Vietnamese and Filipino territory. The Philippines opted to allow the film to screen but with the offending map censored.

“The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,” a spokesperson for the Warner Bros. Film Group clarified in a statement following the Vietnamese ban. “The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the ‘real world.’ It was not intended to make any type of statement.”

In Japan, public outrage erupted last week in response to the studios behind both Barbie and Oppenheimer sharing memes that showed the titular characters together; the films have benefitted significantly from being released at the same time, as many movie-goers made it a point to watch them both on the same day.

“Having two movies from rival studios linked in this way and both boosting each other’s fortunes — both box-office wise and it terms of their profile — I don’t know if there’s a comp for this in the annals of box-office history,” Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for data firm Comscore, said in July. “There’s really no comparison for this.”

Japan is the only nation to suffer nuclear bombings, directly as a result of the research J. Robert Oppenheimer engaged in. Japanese users expressed outrage at the glib display of a nuclear detonation in a meme alongside Margot Robbie’s Barbie character. Some created Barbie-themed September 11 memes to convey how they felt about the Oppenheimer images.

Barbie‘s Japanese distributors issued an apology for the outrage.

“We apologize to those who felt uncomfortable because of these inconsiderable reactions,” Warner Bros. Japan said in a statement on Twitter.

Elsewhere in the world, the government of Lebanon banned Barbie this week on the grounds that it “promotes sexual deviance and transsexuality,” as one of the actors in the film identifies as transgender. Kuwait followed suit, though Saudi Arabia – which only legalized movie theaters in 2018 – greenlit screenings of the film.

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