Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that two of the most anticipated movies of the year, Barbie and Oppenheimer, opened on the same day last week.
Now, normally big movies stake out their release dates and defend them like they were Roarke’s Drift, lest competition lower their individual box office receipts. But that’s not what we got this time around. No, this time we got the phenomenon known as Barbenheimer.
It began, as so many things do, on Twitter, where users noticed that two such chalk ‘n’ cheese movies coming out simultaneously was kinda funny. “Kinda funny” is a good way to viral, and before long we had a cavalcade of mock posters, t-shirts, and whatnot contrasting the bright, bubbly universe of Barbie with Oppenheimer’s dour, self-serious aesthetic. Heck, our own critic called the former “a wild and weird feminist statement, shaped in candified plastic” and praised Cillian Murphy’s layered central performance in the latter. ” Like peanut butter and jelly, it’s the seeming incompatibility that results in a great flavour.
Things got really fun when the filmmakers got in on the act. Barbie director Greta Gerwig and star Margot Robbie posted social media snaps of themselves holding up tickets to Oppenheimer, while Tom Cruise, whose Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part One opened earlier, shared a selfie of himself with director Christopher McQuarrie holding up tickets to both Barbie and Oppenheimer, and exhorted fans to make it a double feature (Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan has been characteristically circumspect about the whole thing).
Which seemed to catch on! Debate raged over what order to watch them in, with the general consensus seeming to be that you want Oppenheimer as a shot and Barbie as a chaser, although Guardian columnist Stuart Heritage did not enjoy the experience at all, calling it “…a little like having your mother’s funeral invaded by a flashmob of parking circus clowns.” Of course, if you’re used to packing your viewing calendar to the gills at a film festival, such a tonal whiplash should present no significant issues.
But here’s the thing: it worked. It’s difficult to say if a lot of audience members took up the Barbenheimer double feature challenge, but we do know that both did fantastically well at the box office. Barbie raked in a massive US$377m global haul for its opening weekend—the highest ever for a woman director—while Oppenheimer, whose appeal is unarguably narrower, took US$174.2m. The impact of the Barbenheimer meme clade certainly had a hand in what is now the fourth largest US domestic weekend ever, coming at a time when the state of theatrical distribution has never been more parlous. So thank you, Barbie, thank you, Bob, and thank you, the legions of terminally online people who put so much effort into welding these two disparate films into a genuine cultural phenomenon.
