My film ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ tops US box office
The lead at the U.S. box office was markedly conflicted this weekend, with two films projected to top the charts, one about the famous doll and the other about the inventor of the atomic bomb.
Since Friday morning, hundreds of thousands of film lovers in North America have come to movie theaters to watch “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”
U.S. and Canadian premiere figures suggest this weekend’s take will be one of the highest the industry has achieved this year.
The feature film about the most popular doll has earned more than $22 million to date, compared with $10.5 million for the story about the first nuclear weapon, according to Box Office Pro.
And by the end of the weekend, “Barbie” is likely to make around $150 million, surpassing the earnings of “Avatar” part two last December.
“Expectations are very high, so the question is not whether these two films will be successful, but the scale of success,” Daniel Loria, editor-in-chief of Box Office Pro, told AFP.
According to the National Association of Movie Theater Owners, more than 200,000 viewers even plan to watch the two movies back-to-back before the weekend is over.
The simultaneous release of the two films sparked a wave of jokes and comments on social networks, such as a scene where someone imagined changing clothes when switching from one film to another, and a set of spinoffs expressing the practice emerged, dubbed “Pappenheimer,” which remixed the titles of the two films.
Sean Robbins, a senior analyst at Box Office Pro, noted that “Barbie’s online communications strategy has spread like wildfire, attracting an entire generation and an often underappreciated female audience,” while director Christopher Nolan has attracted his own loyal audience.
In a statement to AFP, the expert added that the two republics “mixed in an unexpected way, shortening popular culture through the Pappenheimer phenomenon”.
According to Robbins, this effect may have “enhanced interest in the two films, because if they were released on two different dates, neither of them would be able to achieve this goal alone.”
Franchise entertainment research analyst David A. Gross believes that the synchronization of the two films will not lead to competition between them, but will be mutually beneficial and stimulate the audience’s desire to watch the movie.
Gross confirmed that he did not recall a “similar phenomenon” happening before.
“Oppenheimer was more for men and older people, and Barbie was more for women and young people, but he found that everyone could go to a theater and see both,” he said.
“At 10:30 this morning, the movie theater was full, it was crazy,” said Eric Adams, 27, in New York, explaining that he would go to see the Barbie dolls at night because tickets couldn’t be sold at other times.
In Colorado, Emma McNeely, 35, said she’d prefer to stream “Oppenheimer” at home, but events around her prompted her return to the big screen.
As for Hollywood, while the double whammy of writers and actors continues, it has a hand in fostering the phenomenon.
Tom Cruise, star of the new Mission: Impossible movie, took to Twitter to express his enthusiasm for both films. In turn, “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig and the movie’s leading lady Margot Robbie showed up with two tickets to the Tom Cruise movie.