‘Likely’ Story: Zack Snyder Thinks More People Saw ‘Rebel Moon’ Than ‘Barbie’

Director Zack Snyder was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience for an exceptionally bro-ey interview about his career and the current state of the film industry. The Watchman director joined the podcaster/conspiracy theorist to discuss his pivot to Netflix, which released his big-budget Star Wars fanfic knockoff Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire.

During the interview, Snyder described the “crazy” model of Netflix, making the outlandish claim that more people watched Rebel Moon than Barbie. Yes, THAT Barbie, that broke box office records and raked in nearly $1.5 BILLION dollars. Barbie was not only the highest-grossing film of 2023 but the highest-grossing Warner Bros. film of all time, outgrossing Snyder’s Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

“You think about Netflix, for instance, where you push a button,” Snyder said. “‘Rebel Moon,’ right? Say right now it’s almost at 90 million views, right? 80 or 90 million accounts turned it on, give or take. They assume two viewers per screening, right? That’s the kind of math. So you think if that movie was in the theater as a distribution model, that’s like 160,000,000 people supposedly watching based on that math. 160,000,000 people at $10 a ticket would be…what is that math? I don’t know. 160,000,000 times ten. That’s 1.6 billion. So more people probably saw ‘Rebel Moon’ than saw ‘Barbie’ in the theater, right?”

WHO is doing Snyder’s math? It’s Ken, isn’t it? That’s some Mojo Dojo Casa House arithmetic.

Now it’s not like folks tune into Rogan’s podcast for anything closely resembling accuracy. But still, this outlandish claim raised more than a few eyebrows. The A.V. Club‘s Sam Barsanti ran the numbers using Netflix’s metrics, where he concluded, “If we are enormously generous and we assume that it got 2 million for each of the seven weeks since then, that makes it about 86 million [views].” In contrast, “somewhere around 135 million tickets were sold for Barbie—which is quite a bit higher than our generous estimate for Rebel Moon.”

These numbers are backed up by the cultural impact of each film. While Barbie was the cultural event of 2023, spawning countless memes, trends, and merch, Rebel Moon made no more cultural impact than a weekly Netflix film release like Bright or The Mother. After all, women aren’t walking down the street yelling “Hi Kora!” at each other.

Rebel Moon didn’t even make the Top 10 list of English films on Netflix. To put this in perspective, the 10th most streamed original film, Extraction, got 135,700,000 views in the first 91 days, approximately the same number of tickets that Barbie sold.

But Snyder shouldn’t feel bad: his Justice League: The Snyder Cut got a shoutout in the Barbie movie as a frequent topic of conversation among the Kens.

(featured image: Warner Bros. Pictures)