It’s like in a music video when the artist suddenly pulls out the new Samsung explosive device, and your heart sinks a little.
Not only is it necessary for even decent movies to be packaged within some IP, they also seem to rely on selling ad space within the movie itself.
Very bleak.
I think the issue you have is with capitalism. Artists don’t know with any level of certainty if their movie, music video etc will have any substantial return on their investment. So if you’re a studio sinking millions of dollars into something, you want to know that you’re gonna make at least some of that back, and negotiating ahead of time for a sponsored segment can help guarantee at least a small return. This is made much worse by the downturn of the movie industry in America with record low movie tickets being sold. It’s just becoming less and less feasible to make money from movies (and music/music videos for that matter but they’re a much different type of media) these days.
If people were able to make art for arts sake, not have to worry about people paying for it, being able to pay rent etc. then I think this would disappear almost entirely.
“It’s capitalism” is an unsatisfying explanation because one the one hand it’s sort of trivially true, but on the other, good movies have been made under capitalism. Hindsight’s 20/20, but I don’t really buy that the execs didn’t see a massive ROT on Barbie beforehand, given it’s prestige, cast, director etc. I understand that some cruddy network TV show or “Tetris the movie” or whatever have to fall back on advertising to cover their costs, but this one? Seems entirely unnecessary, even more so considering the artistic cost it came along with.
The bleak thing is not advertising per se, which we are used to, but advertising in movies that seem far too big for it. And then of course crass, embarrassing way it was implemented here.