Barbie Ending Explained: The End of Barbie Was Inevitable

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Let’s make this simple: Do you want to know if there’s a post-credits scene in Barbie? We’ll tell you right here: There are no post-credits or mid-credits scenes in the film.

That said, the credits do feature a fun tribute of sorts to the history of the Barbie doll, so you might want to stick around for that!

Full spoilers for Barbie follow…

Barbie Ending Explained

By the near-end of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Barbie (Margot Robbie) has gone flat-footed; traversed land, sea, the great outdoors, and outer space — to the real world and back; been arrested twice; dismantled Ken’s (Ryan Gosling) cowboy patriarchy and restored the idyllic matriarchy of Barbieland. And still, she’s left staring back into the internal void of self-doubt, feeling unworthy, ugly, and unfulfilled. Welcome to sentience, Barbie.

For a movie that works within a fever dream of internal logic — “just feel it,” the ghost of Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), tells Barbie-as-audience-proxy in the second-to-last scene — Barbie is grounded in humanism (and, yes, unapologetic feminism) that was inevitably leading to the choice Barbie is given at the end of the film the second she asked if anyone else had thoughts about dying during the co-ed rager in the first 10 minutes.

In the conclusion, Barbie and Ruth have a heart-to-heart in the same empty James Turrell-esque set (Barbieland’s collective unconscious, if you will) where the Kens staged “I’m Just Ken.” It’s their grand reunion after Barbie escapes Mattel HQ and the dimwitted horde of all-male execs, headed by Will Ferrell, who chased her into the liminal space of a hallway. Opening a door to a sun-lit kitchen, she finds Ruth sitting serenely at the table. (“There’s a rumor that her ghost lives on the 17th floor,” whispers Ferrell toward the end of the film. Notably, Handler died in 2002 at 85.) After her adventure, feeling unsure about who she is anymore, Barbie is presented with the options of staying in Barbieland or entering the real world as a human, with all their flaws, anxieties, and cellulite.

For Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie,” the first of the Barbies named after Handler’s own daughter Barbara, it’s like a creation meeting their benevolent god and asking why they were ever born. Ruth appeals to Barbie with her personal story, including passing mentions of her double mastectomy and tax evasion — both of which are true to life. Handler had breast cancer in the ’70s and was indicted with four other Mattel execs for manipulating sales records to influence the company’s stock prices between 1971-1973.

Though this is certainly a “wait, what?” moment, it wouldn’t serve the film’s story to try and explain it further. The point is, as Ruth says, that living as a human, and especially a woman, is a messy, complicated affair, doubling down on the Cognitive Dissonance of Modern Women monologue America Ferrera’s executive assistant Gloria gives the Barbies to break the spell of Ken. (It’s worth mentioning the greatness of that whole sequence of baiting Kens to mansplain Photoshop, The Godfather, Stephen Malkmus, etc., leading to an acoustic guitar circle of Kens singing Kendom’s on-the-nose national anthem, Matchbox Twenty’s 1996 rock radio hit “Push,” on the beach. How do the Barbies and Kens know these cultural references? Just don’t think about it.)

After spending so much of the movie fretting over the fact that she had never wanted anything to change, Barbie has seen and experienced too much to ever accept life as she knew it.

After spending so much of the movie fretting over the fact that she had never wanted anything to change, Barbie has seen and experienced too much to ever accept life as she knew it, a never-ending string of the best day ever. Even Ken, after reading about dudes and horses and war and “brewski beers,” has learned something new about himself and the world he lives in: The patriarchy stinks and his identity is more than just following around Barbie like a puppy. “Maybe it’s Barbie, and it’s Ken,” Robbie tells Gosling right before he goes down the Barbie Dream House’s pink circular slide shouting in self-enlightenment, “Ken is meeeee!”

Barbie’s existential crisis was instigated by the fact that Gloria, Barbie’s owner, has been going through her own struggles as her daughter Sasha grows up. She copes by drawing Depression Barbie — which manifests into an ad for a doll that scrolls Instagram for seven hours a day and continuously rewatches BBC’s Pride and Prejudice — and Irrepressible Thoughts of Death Barbie. This has forever altered Barbie’s brain chemistry, but all she needs is the confidence boost from Ruth to take the leap forward into a new life where, yeah, she’ll probably still be catcalled, feel bad sometimes, get cellulite, and eventually die. But it’ll all be because of her own decisions, and there will also be the small joys to be found outside of a once-pristine existence.

She’s realized that not every day we spend alive is amazing, not every night is girls’ night. It’s full of mundane tasks and appointments, like going to the gynecologist, as Barbie does in the last scene — which is another leap of logic in itself. Earlier in the film, Barbie says that neither she nor Ken have genitals. Does a doll choosing to become human suddenly grant her a digestive and reproductive system? Can the ghost of a doll inventor even do that? Once again, it’s best not to think about it too much. At the end of the day, it’s a surrealist extended toy commercial. Just feel it.

Is There a Post-Credits Scene in Barbie?

Mankind will forever mark Friday, July 21, as the day Barbenheimer officially arrived. “And it was on that day,” the history books will read, “that humankind reached for their phones as the credits began to roll, and searched ‘barbie post credits.’ This is the word.”

Of course, they’re also gonna be searching for “Oppenheimer post credits,” but that’s a different chapter of that particular history text. As noted at the top of this page, there are no post-credits scenes in Barbie, but there is a cute little tribute to the Mattel toy line if you want to stick around for that.

Be sure to also check out our Barbie interview with Gerwig and the cast on why the character has always been more than just a toy. Or dig in on the original version of the Barbie movie that Amy Schumer (and others) almost made. And hit up our how to watch Barbie guide!

What Did We Think of Barbie?

In IGN’s review of Barbie, our own Alyssa Mora said the film was “a masterful exploration of femininity and the pressures of perfection. This hyper-femme roller-coaster ride boasts meticulous production design, immaculate casting, and a deep-seated reverence for Barbie herself. Margot Robbie sparkles at the center of the film, alongside Ryan Gosling’s airheaded Ken and America Ferrera’s well-meaning Gloria.”

Over on Rotten Tomatoes, Barbie has an 89% fresh rating at the time of this writing, and an 86% audience score. And on Metacritic, the film has a critics score of 80 and a user score of 5.3 out of 10. Sounds like someone got review-bombed over there… and it didn’t matter one bit as Barbie is already breaking box office records!

This story was updated on July 28, 2023, with the latest information about the Barbie movie. It was originally posted on July 20, 2023.