Barbie’s Snyder Cut joke was originally aimed at Blade Runner

❘ Updated: 2023-11-10T02:40:31

Writer Barbie and Deckard from Blade Runner

Lionsgate/Warner Bros.

Barbie featured plenty of pop culture references, to the point that some ended up being cut, including a Ridley Scott and Blade Runner joke.

Barbie, the now iconic summer blockbuster, follows the titular doll, played by Margot Robbie, as she ventures out into the real world. And of course, Ken is also there.

As we state in our five-star review of the movie, “Barbie is an enigma of a movie. It is a children’s film made for adults, done in a thoughtful and loving way. It’s comforting, but never pandering. Like finding one of your old dolls in a drawer at your parent’s house, Barbie manages to take a stereotypical object we’re all familiar with, and make it personally existential.”

The movie took the world by storm this summer, sparking old and new discourse around the way it mocks the patriarchy and male stereotypes. One example includes a joke about the Zack Snyder cut of The Justice League. But it turns out that this joke could have featured another director: Blade Runner‘s Ridley Scott.

Barbie was going to feature Ridley Scott and Blade Runner

During an interview with Variety, Barbie co-writers Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach discussed the debates they would have over the script: “Naturally, whoever is the most convincing wins, and then the other thinks, ‘You’re probably right,’” Baumbach explained.

One example was a reference to Blade Runner, which would have come at the expense of the Snyder Cut joke. In a later scene in Barbie, Writer Barbie snaps out of the Ken’s brainwashing, and explains how when under their control she seemed to care an awful lot about “The Snyder Cut.” This joke was originally going to be a reference to the Blade Runner director’s cut, along with its controversial removal of the first cut’s voiceover:

“One of the Barbies says to Ken, ‘Oh my god, I never would have realized that Deckard was a replicant,’” Gerwig stated. “Then when she gets un-brainwashed, there’s a version where she said, ‘I liked the voiceover. I needed it to help me understand what was happening. Nobody’s following this.’”

In fact, Ridley Scott himself was even going to make an appearance, according to earlier drafts of the script. Unfortunately, this never came to fruition. “It wasn’t making fun of him. We loved him as we love all of our references,” Baumbach made sure to mention, and Gerwig added: “Every reference we had was out of love. We love Sly Stallone. Everything was a lighters-up tribute.”

Check out our other Barbie coverage below: