Barbie: Greta Gerwig Reveals They Cut “Fart Opera” From the Margot Robbie Movie

Imagine a Barbie movie with a musical fart number. Okay, it’s not as romantic as say Richard Beymer singing Maria in West Side Story (1961), or Gerard Butler belting out The Music of the Night from The Phantom of the Opera (2004). A fart opera might actually sound ridiculous to some fans of Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster, but if the writer/director had her way, Barbie would have featured a cheese-cutting opera of a spectacle about midway through the movie.

Gerwig said in an interview on the IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast:

In every movie we’ve made together, we’ve always tried to get in like a proper fart joke. And we’ve never done that. We had like a fart opera in the middle, just this giant fart opera. And everyone was like — and I thought it was really funny, but that was not the consensus. I think if we just keep trying and failing to get fart jokes into things like maybe, I don’t know…

Gerwig is referring to working with film editor Nick Houy on Barbie. And she also collaborated with him on Lady Bird (2017) and her remake of Little Women (2019). It’s hard to say if Gerwig’s adaptation of the Mattel doll would have scored as well with audiences if Barbie (Margot Robbie) or Ken (Ryan Gosling) were cutting cheese in an obstreperous fart opera.

Related: Barbie: Ranking Every Song on the Official Soundtrack

The Fart Opera Didn’t Make the Final Cut of Barbie

Barbie continues to score off the charts with audiences and critics alike, at the time of this writing. Greta Gerwig’s latest film received an “A” CinemaScore, a 90% Tomatometer rating and an audience score of 86%. But would the tale of Mattel’s famous doll visiting the real world have been rated as highly with a fart opera tooting its way through the midpoint of the movie?

Other notable scenes didn’t make Barbie’s theatrical cut, but they had nothing to do with farting. For instance, Little Women co-stars Timothée Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan were supposed to have cameos in Barbie, but scheduling conflicts keep them both from visiting Barbieland. It has been clear, though, that whatever ended up on the cutting room floor could not have elevated Barbie beyond the summer blockbuster it has proven to be.

As Barbie enters its second weekend in cinemas, the film is forecasted to near the $600-million mark worldwide by the end of business on Friday, July 28 (per Deadline). And according to The Hollywood Reporter, Gerwig’s bright pink film will eclipse $700 million over its second weekend in cinemas. Warner Bros. is likely still celebrating over the most money ever made by one of its movies in a single week, which came to $578.5 million thanks to the picture’s global totals through Thursday, July 27.

Barbie is now playing in theaters.