Director Zack Snyder is doubling down on his eyebrow-raising claim that more people watched his Netflix film Rebel Moon than saw Barbie during its massive theatrical run last year. However, he acknowledges that the latter had a much larger cultural footprint.
The divisive filmmaker made waves back in March when he told Joe Rogan that viewership data provided by Netflix suggested around 160 million accounts tuned in for Rebel Moon’s debut, extrapolating that to mean the movie was seen by more eyeballs than Barbie’s box office numbers.
“People are like, ‘Oh, well, Snyder’s crazy,’ but literally I just am doing [the math] with this, not anything else,” Snyder recently told Gizmodo when asked to clarify his comments. “If now we’re close to 100 million viewers, 100 million views times two is 200 million views.”
While standing firmly behind those viewership estimates, the director didn’t deny that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie overshadowed his space opera in terms of sparking global conversation and pop culture fervor.
“The cultural significance of Barbie was happening when it was in the theaters,” Snyder admitted. “That’s when we all took a bite of the ‘Barbie’ apple, and happily. And so my only point is that I think there is a theatrical zeitgeist. Even though maybe more people have eyes on something, the actual sort of cultural significance is dictated still by the theater.”
Snyder’s original comments drew backlash from cinephiles who felt he was minimizing the importance of the theatrical experience. With this clarification, the filmmaker is attempting to give appropriate credit to movie theaters as driving forces of broader cultural moments, even if streaming allows for larger absolute viewership in some cases.
