A Barbie doll is seen at Barbie Expo, an exhibit that celebrates the best-selling doll's nearly six decades of historyPaul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
These Barbies are missing the party.
For years they had been on display, hundreds of them, lovingly showcased at the Barbie Expo, unexpectedly located in a downtown Montreal shopping mall. The free exhibit at Les Cours Mont-Royal included vintage Barbies, designer tie-ins with the likes of Oscar de la Renta and Christian Dior, and oddities such as a Barbie modelled after Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, complete with plastic ravens pecking at her face and clothes.
With the mania around the release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, this should have been the Barbie Expo’s time. But since the spring, the attraction has been closed to visitors, the valuable dolls removed for their own protection.
“It’s like a bad joke,” said Emily Dean, a social media marketing specialist for the mall, who works on social media for the expo.
First, there was water damage. A burbling fountain at the centre of the exhibit was demolished in an attempt to find the source of the issue, Ms. Dean said. (Fortunately, no dolls were harmed – they were placed in storage while work progressed.) The mall’s owners, Montreal-based real estate company Soltron Group, made plans to renovate, and to relocate the exhibit one floor up from its previous location, which was partly underground. The expo was due to reopen this month, just before the movie’s premiere.
The timing would have been fortuitous. While the expo has a licensing deal with Barbie’s parent company, Mattel, which allows it to use the Barbie name and logo, it has no marketing deal with Warner Bros. and has been careful not to advertise any affiliation with the film, according to Ms. Dean. Still, the mall is located right next to a large movie theatre, and the owners were expecting an influx of visitors driven by heightened interest in all things Barbie.
But on July 13, a massive storm hit Montreal. According to Environment and Climate Change Canada, 82 millimetres of rain fell in the city’s downtown core in around two hours. The torrential rainfall led to road closings and flooding – including at the mall. The Barbie Expo’s big reopening was postponed once again.
“Because of the damage all over the city, it’s been hard to get the repairs done on time,” Ms. Dean said. “It’s just a waiting game at this point.”
What was this surreal space doing in the middle of a mall in the first place? The Barbie Expo first opened in 2016, and was the brainchild of a Barbie enthusiast who also happens to be a member of the family that owns the mall, according to Ms. Dean. (She did not specify who this was. Soltron Group is owned by Avi Sochaczevski.)
“It started as a passion project,” Ms. Dean said. Over the years, it has grown significantly as the mall has acquired more dolls from collectors who have listed them for sale online – a significant investment for the mall’s owners, as many of the dolls are rare. Ms. Dean said she did not know what the most valuable doll in the collection is worth.
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The expo advertises itself as the largest permanent Barbie exhibit in the world. Mattel did not respond to requests to verify this claim.
The exhibit does not charge admission, but encourages visitors to make donations to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. According to the charity, the expo has raised nearly $66,000 since 2016.
There has been a benefit to the mall as well. “It’s definitely, definitely increased foot traffic,” Ms. Dean said. “I get constant e-mails, constant DMs from people from out of town wanting to come visit, from across the world.”
This kind of attraction has become prized among mall owners as a way to draw in visitors who might just spend money once they are there – rather than shopping online from the comfort of their homes. Some malls in Canada have hosted food-truck festivals, outdoor movie screenings and kids’ entertainment, such as a “Dr. Seuss Experience.” Toronto’s Yorkdale Mall recently held a Dunder-Mifflin exhibit for fans of the sitcom The Office.
Visitors admire Barbie dolls at Barbie Expo, a permanent exhibit that celebrates the best-selling doll's nearly six decades as a fashionista, in 2016.Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
And the Barbie Expo continues to draw people to Les Cours Mont-Royal, though not in the way its owners likely hoped: Ms. Dean said she has noticed many people wandering through the mall recently, looking for the exhibit. The website dedicated to the expo has a notice informing visitors of the temporary closing and apologizing for the inconvenience.
Another method of communicating with potential visitors has also gone dark, however: this week, the expo’s Instagram account was taken offline, though Ms. Dean said it was not clear why this had happened, and that she hoped it was temporary.
Barbie, the film, has been a bright-pink glimmer of hope for a movie-theatre industry still recovering from the pandemic and facing the threat of streaming. The movie opened against the backdrop of a widespread labour dispute that has shut down production in Hollywood, with the unions representing actors and writers both on strike.
During the turmoil, Barbie exceeded expectations, with a US$162-million domestic box office take on its opening weekend, making it the highest-grossing opening this year and the biggest ever for a female director. This week, Canadian movie-theatre giant Cineplex Inc. reported that Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer combined drew in 1.4 million people to its locations across Canada, with box-office revenue totalling $19-million.
It was a summer box office weekend record for Cineplex, and the second-highest-grossing weekend in the company’s history. Everyone’s favourite anatomically impossible blonde is clearly having a moment.
“We were definitely preparing for a lot more people,” Ms. Dean said. “As much as the Barbie Expo are not promoting the movie or affiliating ourselves with it, everyone is just entranced by Barbie right now … It’s honestly just bad luck.”