An 11-Year-Old TV Show Is Trending Worldwide On Netflix, And It’s All Thanks To The Barbie Movie-TGN

Summary

• The success of the recent Barbie movie has caused an older Barbie series to trend on Netflix.

• Barbie Life in the Dreamhouse season 1 landed at No. 5 on Netflix’s global Top 10 English Language TV series list, with 1.9 million viewers.

• The Barbie media franchise has a long history, with various animated specials, web series, and direct-to-video movies.

The success of the Barbie movie has caused a decade-old series to trend on Netflix. The new movie, which stars Margot Robbie as the titular doll, is a live-action feature that follows Barbie and Ken (Ryan Gosling) to the real world on a journey of self-discovery. After opening in theaters on July 21, Barbie nabbed the best domestic opening weekend of 2023 with a stellar $162 million, followed by a second-weekend gross of $93 million, which outperformed the opening weekends of all but 6 movies this year.

Netflix has now calculated their global Top 10 English Language TV series for the week of July 24 through July 30, which seems to have gotten a bump from the Barbie movie’s success. Included among the big Netflix titles on the list such as The Witcher season 3 and The Lincoln Lawyer season 2 is Barbie Life in the Dreamhouse season 1, which landed at No. 5 with 1.9 million viewers amassing 9.1 million total viewing hours. The animated web series, which originally premiered on YouTube and the Barbie website, ran for 75 episodes from 2012 through 2015.

There are a lot of factors that have combined to make the Barbie movie so appealing to so many people. This includes the fact that the movie is PG-13 and helmed by acclaimed director Greta Gerwig, appealing to adults who liked Barbie when they were kids as much as kids who enjoy Barbie themselves. Likewise, this is the first big-budget live-action blockbuster to feature the Barbie characters.

However, the Barbie media franchise existed long before the Barbie 2023 cast took center stage. The depiction of Barbie onscreen began in 1984 with the release of the Commodore 64 game Barbie. Since then, Barbie has appeared in numerous animated specials, books, comic books, music albums, and, of course, web series.

Barbie also starred in 16 direct-to-video animated movies that were released between 2001 and 2009 such as Barbie as Rapunzel and Barbie Fairytopia: Magic of the Rainbow. It’s not surprising that the success of Barbie helped give a bump to one of her projects that was readily available on streaming. However, as time goes on and the movie continues to grow, these other titles will likely all get a boost as more and more people seek out additional Barbie content.

Source: Netflix