It wasn’t until about a week before its release that the truth began coming out about the movie. Director Greta Gerwig and lead actress Margo Robbie were telling everyone that it was a feminist movie with commentary about the patriarchy. The movie was pretty anti-male, and people would get a firm dose of modern feminist commentary during the viewing.

But by that point, it was too late. Their revelation was too quiet compared to the cacophony of the hype. Warner Bros. put so much time and effort into its PR campaign that one or two little interviews were going to go right past pretty much everyone. Women had already made plans to go see it, even going so far as to plan their outfits on the big day.

Barbie went gangbusters, eclipsing Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, Oppenheimer. According to The-Numbers, the film has grossed over a whopping $382 million as of this writing.

Immediately, the film became a new front in the culture war with two sides forming. One called the film out for being the hyper-feminist, anti-patriarchy propaganda that it was, and others proclaimed that the movie was exactly what women needed to see and hear.

There are a few movie reviewers out there that I actually trust and one of them is The Critical Drinker. As he describes it, the film is one of the best examples of a marketing team duping people into seeing a movie by selling it as one thing when it was really another.

Yesterday, I made a pretty confident prediction that Disney’s Snow White would bomb at the box office due to its tired feminist overtones and that movies that did this would be plagued with low returns for a good long while. Immediately, I was confronted with the example of Barbie being a hyper-feminist film that performed really, really well.

Yeah, of course, it performed well. Why wouldn’t it? Hardly anyone knew the premise of the film going into it. The marketing team at WB brilliantly stepped around its real themes constantly, pushing this as a meta-comedy that everyone could enjoy and get a kick out of. People went in thinking they were going to get Talladega Nights and found out they were getting a very spiteful Vagina Monologues.

Hollywood literally fooled people into seeing something that, if they were more aware of what they were walking into, would have passed on. Sure, it probably would have made an okay chunk of change just by virtue of being a movie about Barbie starring Robbie and Ryan Gosling, but it probably wouldn’t have been the box office success that it is today.

WB knew you wouldn’t see it if it got that political, so they effectively lied to you. They baited you with something you actually wanted, and they knew you wanted, and then counted the cash you gave them as you found out the truth.

It’s pretty unclear what will happen to the movie at this point. It might have so much momentum that the film will continue to gain box office glory, or the word will spread about its true identity and the cash will dramatically slow down. It’s too early to tell but we’ll know more by this weekend.

The thing is, at this point, the damage is done. The movie is considered a success even if the second-weekend box office numbers fall off a cliff. More egregious is the fact that Hollywood now has a blueprint for fooling people into seeing politicized films.

But the bottom line here is that you were lied to, and the numbers that Barbie is bringing in aren’t numbers that were honestly come by.