This is the Barbie scene that Mattel wanted to delete from the movie

Now that Barbie has been confirmed as a resounding success and even has won the first weekend of Barbenheimer, Greta Gerwig and Mattel are ready to make peace. The director of Lady Bird and Little Women has admitted that the leaks about her run-ins with the company were true and that both parties had their plus and cons on the inclusion of a scene that Mattel wanted to remove from the film. In an interview with Rolling Stone (via Variety), Gerwig unveiled what said sequence was that the company asked to remove and has explained how she defended it from the executives behind the doll.

Strangely, it’s not one of the scenes you might be thinking of. If you think Mattel had problems with the jokes about its board of directors, you are wrong. They were delighted with that moment and with Will Ferrell. It also had nothing to do with the appearance of discontinued Barbies or the speeches about how the doll injured the feminist cause. Actually, the scene that was almost deleted is the one in which Margot Robbie sits at a bus stop in the real world, bursting into tears overcome by her circumstances, and then sees an old woman next to her. Barbie says that she is beautiful and the old lady replies: “I know.”

“I love that scene so much,” said Gerwig. “And the older woman on the bench is the costume designer Ann Roth. She’s a legend. It’s a cul-de-sac of a moment, in a way — it doesn’t lead anywhere. And in early cuts, looking at the movie, it was suggested, ‘Well, you could cut it. And actually, the story would move on just the same.’ And I said, ‘If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.”

She continued: “That’s how I saw it. To me, this is the heart of the movie,The way Margot plays that moment is so gentle and so unforced. There’s the more outrageous elements in the movie that people say, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe Mattel let you do this,’ or, ‘I can’t believe Warner Bros. let you do this.’ But to me, the part that I can’t believe that is still in the movie is this little cul-de-sac that doesn’t lead anywhere — except for, it’s the heart of the movie.”

Barbie has currently taken the spot for the best-performing movie at the box office directed by a Woman. At the moment, it’s managed to rake in over $300 million dollars in its first weekend, and that number is only going to increase in the following weeks. With a production cost of $145 million, there’s no denying its success.