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Image source, Warner Bros. Pictures
Come on Barbie, let's get charty: Even Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling can't resist a sing-along to the soundtrack
By Francesca Osborne
BBC Newsbeat
Barbie's already taken over the box office and now the film's soundtrack is set to conquer the UK music charts.
The album features 17 original songs by some of the biggest names in pop including Lizzo, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and Nicki Minaj.
And tracks from the pink, sparkly LP are expected to bring the Kenergy to the Official Singles Chart later.
Dance the Night Away, What Was I Made For and Barbie World are all tipped for the top 20.
You might think that recruiting such a star-studded line-up for a movie soundtrack would be hard work.
But the film's music supervisor George Drakoulias tells BBC Newsbeat you'd be wrong.
"Nobody said no," he says. "Everybody was really excited."
That included two stars at the top of George's wish list, Nicki Minaj and Lizzo, along with superstar writer and producer Mark Ronson.
George says he enticed Mark on to the project with a simple text message: "Hey Barbie?"
"He called me right back and we sent him a script," says George. "That started the ball rolling."
Mark ended up curating the film's whole soundtrack, writing the score and penning the film's closing track, Dance the Night Away, with Dua Lipa.
Image source, EPA
Image caption,Dua Lipa's song Dance the Night Away was the first song from the soundtrack to be released
The soundtrack's also played a big part in Barbie's massive marketing campaign.
Songs from the album have been steadily released in the run-up to the film's release, which George says has "helped fuel excitement for the movie".
"It was a perfect symbiotic relationship of the music driving the movie and the movie driving the music," he says.
"Once you saw the movie and how well the music works, as soon as they left the theatre people went out and got the album."
And, this being Barbie, physical copies of the soundtrack are available in "cotton candy" vinyl and on transparent pink cassette tapes.
George refuses to reveal his favourite track but says he was "blown away" by Billie Eilish's What Was I Made For.
He says the singer was shown just 25 minutes of the film and managed to "take what she'd seen and encapsulate it into this heartbreaking song of being a woman".
George says he's very proud of the album and its success in the charts is "the icing on the cake".
"It's Barbie's world, we just live in it," he says.
As recently as 2018, The Greatest Showman soundtrack sold 2.1m copies in the UK, outpacing new releases by Drake and Ariana Grande.
But the idea of chart-topping artists working together on a blockbuster movie had largely fallen out of favour in the era of superhero franchises and cinematic universes.
Even before that, young adult movies like Twilight and Hunger Games were aligning themselves with credible alternative artists like Paramore, Iron & Wine and The National. Lorde even curated the (superb) music for Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Pt 1.
Over the last few years, there have been flickers of the traditional soundtrack album returning. OneRepublic's I Ain't Worried was a breakout hit from last year's Top Gun Maverick; and Post Malone & Swae Lee's Sunflower (from Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse) was a top three single in 2018.
But, just like the movie, the Barbie soundtrack is confounding expectations. The tracklist is like a who's who of modern pop - Lizzo, Ice Spice, PinkPantheress, Dua Lipa. Is this the beginning of a new era?
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