Best Picture 2024: Barbie’s Box Office Blow-out – Gerwig Makes History

Hitching Oppenheimer to Barbie has paid off big time at the box office. It’s a little like the “down ballot” voting that ties itself to the top of the ticket. Barbie made history for women directors.

Box Office’s tweet giving the totals:

Est. Weekend Box Office Top 7 for July 21 – July 23, 2023

1. #BarbieTheMovie – $155.00M
2. #Oppenheimer – $80.50M
3. #SoundOfFreedom – $20.14M
4. #MissionImpossible – $19.50M
5. #IndianaJones – $6.70M
6. #InsidiousMovie – $6.50M
7. #Elemental – $5.80M#Barbenheimer #BoxOffice pic.twitter.com/N6FXtEqIAr

— BoxOfficeReport.com (@BORReport) July 23, 2023

$80 million for an R-rated film that isn’t a franchise or a brand is SHOCKING. But I do think we can give some credit to Barbie and to Gerwig, frankly, for building up the hype for Oppeneheimer too. I am going to see the double feature today, in fact, with my nieces.

Taking Deadline’s estimates and adding the final take brings us to:

1.) Barbie (WB) 4,243 theaters, Fri $70.5M, 3-day $155M/Wk 1

2.) Oppenheimer (Uni) 3,610 theaters Fri $33M, 3-day $80M/Wk 1

Globally, according to Deadline, it’s:

Barbie: $337Mand
Oppenheimer: $174.2M 

For both titles, the performances are beyond expectations, buoyed by great critical and audience response as well as the organic worldwide Barbenheimer phenomenon which created fusion at the box office as double bills became the order of the weekend for many moviegoers around the globe. 

And for Gerwig making history, again, from Deadline:

One of the prime records Barbie is breaking this weekend is the best domestic start for a movie helmed by a female director with $155M. That figure beats that of 2019’s Captain Marvel which was co-helmed by Anna Boden and had a $153M start.

Globally at an estimated $337M, Barbie is the second-best start for a movie from a female after Captain Marvel which did $456.7M. Big numbers: the entire global haul for Gerwig’s awards-blockbuster crossover 2019 title, Little Women, was $218.8M.

Other big starts for movies helmed by a woman filmmaker include Patty Jenkin’s Wonder Woman in 2017 which had a $103.2M stateside start.

Needless to say, these two films going viral as “Barbenheimer” has created a frenzy we’re likely not to see again. My own theory is that pairing them together felt like something out of the past for Americans, the kind of thing we never really see anymore — or at least for a while — two very traditional male/female archetypes on display in theaters. I think there is a simmering underneath in our culture right now for traditionalism (covering this in a different piece) that is evidenced by the response to the Barbenheimer meme, which is so very retro.

There is something to the idea of more people online than ever before at a time when more people are alive than ever before, and if you can harness that energy, or Kenergy, you can hit paydirt, as we’re seeing here with Barbenheimer. It would be hard to manufacture, however. This was just a perfect storm of two different kinds of movie fans coming together for a unique moment in movie history that will likely never be replicated. It was fun while it lasted!

The internet is full of content creators who are incredibly imaginative and have tools and audiences to almost replace Hollywood by now (those on strike take note) — and are certainly more immediate, more daring, less censored, and careful – in a way, the internet has now challenged Hollywood the way television challenged Hollywood in the 1950s. Hollywood will have to greatly up its game, which partly explains the success of both Barbie and Oppenheimer – not only do they slot nicely into internet culture but they each offer things we’ve not seen before.

Gerwig’s visual style in Barbie is really what drives that movie’s success, I think. The trailers and images from it tell us we’ve not seen anything like that before. And the same would go for Nolan’s Oppenheimer because we already know Nolan will bring it.

Even the New York Times covered them:

I will spare you an agonizing think piece about the gender binary and such — but there is a THERE there we can save for another time.

And if all of this wasn’t enough of a wake-up call to what our culture has suddenly become — there is an AI version of Barbenheimer too.

And this non-AI trailer is pure genius:

https://twitter.com/thomashelby_obe/status/1678033950500077568?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1678033950500077568%7Ctwgr%5Eccde712cade8e657e5c64604b59f528d948fc904%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2023%2F07%2F22%2Fopinion%2Fbarbie-oppenheimer-meme-culture.html