Why Is Everyone So Damn Excited for the ‘Barbie’ Movie?
This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
I remember when the first Harry Potter film came out in 2001. I was [redacted] years old. Weeks ahead of time, a group of friends and I sent one of our parents (probably my dad) to the movie theater (singular) in the county where I grew up to buy advance tickets to the opening-night midnight showing. Most of us liked the Harry Potter books, but we weren’t among the wild obsessives you imagine when you hear about Harry Potter fans. Still, we were excited.
We made t-shirts. Mine said, “Honk if you’re a Potthead.” (I had never smoked pot; I thought it was hilarious anyway.) A girlfriend of mine’s shirt said, “Show me that 11-inch wand, nice and supple,” a reference that several parents did not like to Harry’s magical wand in the book. We stood for hours in a line that snaked through the strip mall and into the parking lot, to make sure we could get seats together.