How Barbie Wound Up in the Middle of an Asian Maritime Dispute

As we now know, Barbie can be a mermaid, a doctor, a Supreme Court justice, or the president of the United States—but she’s not going to be able to do any of that in Vietnam. The country has banned the release of the Warner Bros. film because of a map that shows China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, an area Vietnam fiercely disputes. “We do not grant license for the American movie ‘Barbie’ to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line,” read a state-run newspaper (according to Variety). The nine-dash line, which grants China control over a large swath of the South China Sea, was ruled invalid by the United Nations in 2016, but China has refused to acknowledge the ruling. 

It’s unclear why such a map exists at all in the Barbie movie, but this dispute has come up in a handful of Hollywood productions in recent years. DreamWorks Animation’s 2019 film Abominable was pulled from release in Vietnam after audiences noticed the nine-dash line on a map in the background of one scene. Last year Uncharted was banned from distribution in the country for the same reason. Both films, however, played reasonably well in China, where Abominable made $16 million and Uncharted grossed $17.8 million. Barbie is scheduled to open in China as well. 

Barbie may seem like an unlikely player in global politics, but it underscores just how often Hollywood has confronted this issue, in even seemingly tiny ways. As Fast X proved earlier this summer, American movies can still have exceptional box office runs in China. For Vietnamese Barbie fans, however, that comes at a serious price.