Movies Like
Movies Like Barbie: Candy Color With Real Teeth
By Jordan A. · · Updated · 5 min read
Barbie (2023) is a strange object. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach wrote a film for a toy company that spends its third act arguing about patriarchy, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling played it completely straight, and it went past a billion dollars worldwide and won the Oscar for Best Original Song, for Billie Eilish and Finneas's "What Was I Made For?"
The thing worth chasing isn't the pink. It's the specific trick of using a candy surface to smuggle in a real argument, so the film looks like a commercial and behaves like a critique. That's rarer than it sounds, and it's the filter for everything below. Each pick says what it shares with Barbie, where it goes somewhere else, and who it's actually for.
The closest matches in tone
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021) was written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who also star as two middle aged culotte enthusiasts from Nebraska on holiday in Florida, with Jamie Dornan as a lovesick henchman who performs an unhinged musical number on a beach. It is the same shade of committed silliness as the Ken storyline and it never once winks. The satire is gentler than Barbie's, aimed at a certain kind of American niceness rather than at gender. Choose it if the Ken beach sequence was your favorite ten minutes.
Legally Blonde (2001) is the film Barbie is in conversation with more than any other. Reese Witherspoon's Elle Woods follows a man to Harvard Law and stays because she's good at it, and the whole movie is about people mistaking pink for stupid. It's much lighter than Barbie and it has no interest in ambiguity: everything works out. That's the difference, and after Barbie's ending some people want exactly that.
Clueless (1995) is Amy Heckerling adapting Jane Austen's Emma into a Beverly Hills high school, with Alicia Silverstone as a girl whose worldview is entirely constructed and who turns out to be right about most things anyway. The yellow plaid is the most influential costume design of the decade. It shares Barbie's affection for its heroine, which is the part most satire gets wrong. It's the easiest watch on this page.
When the candy shell cracks
Heathers (1988) is the mean one. Winona Ryder and Christian Slater in croquet-lawn pastels, killing the popular girls and staging it as suicide, in a high school satire so black that it could not be made now and possibly could not be made then. It shares Barbie's color palette and shares nothing else. Go here if Barbie felt too kind and you wanted it to draw blood.
Mean Girls (2004) sits between those two, with Tina Fey adapting a parenting book into the most quotable teen film of its generation. Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams and a pink Wednesday rule. It has Barbie's structure exactly: an outsider enters a closed pastel society, learns its rules, becomes the thing she was mocking. It's funnier than Barbie and less ambitious, and that's a fair trade for ninety seven minutes.
But I'm a Cheerleader (1999) is Jamie Babbit's film about a cheerleader sent to a conversion camp decorated entirely in Pepto pink and baby blue, with Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall. The production design is doing the argument: the camp teaches gender as a color scheme, which is the joke Barbie's Barbie Land runs on. It was badly reviewed in 1999 and is now a genuine cult film. The tone wobbles. The idea is sharp.
Josie and the Pussycats (2001) got dismissed as a cash-in and is actually a corporate satire about subliminal advertising, stuffed with real brand placements as the joke. Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson play the band. Like Barbie it was made inside the machine it's mocking, by a studio that presumably did not read the script closely. It is not a good film in the conventional sense. It is a very funny one.
The prettier, stranger ones
Poor Things (2023) is Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone in the same awards season as Barbie, doing an adjacent thing much more explicitly: a woman built by a man, discovering the world has been arranged without her consent. Stone won Best Actress. The Lisbon and Alexandria sets are as artificial as Barbie Land and considerably more unsettling. It is also explicit and frequently grotesque, so it's the wrong follow-up for a group watch.
Marie Antoinette (2006) is Sofia Coppola shooting Versailles as a teenage girl's bedroom, with Kirsten Dunst, macarons, Converse in one shot and a post-punk soundtrack. It was booed at Cannes and has aged into something people now teach. It shares Barbie's insistence that a girl's interior life is a serious subject even when it's covered in sugar. Almost nothing happens, which is the reason people either love it or turn it off.
Death Becomes Her (1992) has Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as rivals who drink an immortality potion and then spend the film physically falling apart, with Bruce Willis as the man between them. Robert Zemeckis directed it and it won the Oscar for visual effects. It's the meanest film about aging and beauty standards Hollywood has released, and it's a broad comedy at the same time.
The Substance (2024) is Coralie Fargeat's version of that same argument with the restraint removed, with Demi Moore as a fitness star who takes an unregulated drug that generates a younger self, played by Margaret Qualley. It won the Oscar for makeup and hairstyling and the last twenty minutes are among the most extreme things put in a wide release. It answers Barbie's question about being looked at with a bucket of blood. Be sure before you press play.
How to choose tonight
If you want to laugh, Barb and Star or Mean Girls. If you want the argument sharpened, Poor Things. If you want the color palette with real teeth, Heathers or But I'm a Cheerleader. If you want to feel good and go to bed, Legally Blonde. Where each of these streams changes; the title page on BingeNext shows current US options.
If you'd rather have the picking done for you, our movie recommendation tool takes a few films you already love and returns a shortlist with a reason for each and where they stream.
Topics covered: comedy, fantasy, vibrant, blockbuster, satire, contemporary
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and is responsible for every guide published on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu. Dates, season counts and where-to-watch details in these guides are checked against official sources before publishing, and corrections are welcome at Jordan@Bingenext.com.