International ticket sales brought in $182 million (£142m), too, taking the global total up to $337 million (£263m) – that’s the biggest-ever debut for a film with a female director.

It’s a seriously impressive feat, and although there is yet to be a breakdown of cinemagoers by gender, anecdotally at least it seems like ‘the girlies’ came out to support Greta and Margot Robbie, who served as the film’s executive producer as well as starring as Barbie, in droves.

Seeing a female director break a box office record is always seriously heartening. Women are vastly under-represented behind the camera: the annual Celluloid Ceiling report recently found that in 2022, women made up just 24% of directors, writers, producers, editors and cinematographers working on that year’s top 250 grossing films. The situation is even worse for women of colour. In 2021, USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that they had accounted for less than 2% of all top-grossing directors since 2007.

But there’s another reason why Barbie feels like a cause for celebration. According to social media, there was a real sense of camaraderie between female cinemagoers too, greeting one another with a cheerful “Hi Barbie!” – just like Margot’s version of the plastic fantastic doll hails her equally plastic pals in the film.

“Hi Barbie!” How Greta Gerwig’s movie gave us a moment of collective joy