The filmmaker said putting the movie in the Adapted Screenplay category is 'insulting to the writers.'
Judd Apatow is not a fan of Barbie's Oscar classification. After Variety reported that the Writers Branch executive committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deemed the film an adapted screenplay rather than an original one, the filmmaker took to X to slam the decision.
"It's insulting to the writers to say they were working off of existing material," he tweeted. "There was no existing material or story. There was a clear box."
The outlet reported that The Academy's decision was likely due to the fact that Barbie and Ken were characters long before they were played by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.
The Writers Guild of America, however, has ruled that Greta Gerwig's film has an original screenplay, meaning the script by the director and her husband, Noah Baumbach, will compete in that category at the upcoming WGA Awards.
The Academy's decision means Barbie will likely compete against films including Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppenheimer in the writing category, instead of Past Lives and The Holdovers, as the filmmakers were hoping with their original screenplay campaign.
Barbie has been a huge success, both critically and at the box office.
"It's been an amazing year," Gerwig told ET back in November. "You always hope that things connect and you believe in them, but this was beyond anything I could have foreseen... it's an amazing moment."
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