The Lessons of Barbenheimer Shake Up Movie Industry

The standard narrative this summer is that audiences are tired of going to theaters for movies and would rather just stay home to watch streaming. Audiences stayed home in droves from one more Indiana Jones flick and didn’t show Mission Impossible the love analysts were expecting.

Audiences clearly are tired of franchise movies that have revisited the well too many times.

Conservative critics tell us movies are failing because they are “too woke,” whatever that means.

And yet…

Disney/Pixar’s Elemental was written off as one more Disney failure after having a $29 million opening weekend. But seven weeks into release, it’s brought in $148 million in domestic box office and a total of $424 million globally. Normally a big movie will fall off 50% or 60% after the first weekend, but Elemental held in surprisingly strong with declines in the 30s or even the teens some weeks. Families with kids found their way to the animated feature for weeks after release. It’s not a huge Disney hit, but certainly no disaster.

And then Barbenheimer weekend came along and surprised everyone.

Barbenheimer, as you no doubt know, is a portmanteau combination of the titles of the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer that both released on July 21. Now “everyone knows” that studios try to stagger release of big movies so that they don’t have to compete for audiences.

But these two highly anticipated movies went ahead with the same date – perhaps thinking that there was little overlap between a three-hour-long WW II biopic from director Christopher Nolan and a fashion doll-based fantasy from director Greta Gerwig.

But then something odd happened.  Gerwig and Barbie star Margo Robbie showed off on social media that they had opening day tickets to Oppenheimer.  And MI’s Tom Cruise proclaimed he was going to both. Going to a Barbenheimer double feature became the chic thing to do. But with the two movies having a combined run time of close to six hours with trailers, that’s a pretty big commitment.

Now the last time I did an insane double feature was in the summer 1989 when I went to the Cinerama to see the 70mm re-release of Lawerence of Arabia in the afternoon and to a regular theater to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in the evening. Nearly six hours of movie in one day – one an epic, one a popcorn muncher. Lots of fun, but would have been better spread out over a couple of days.

Nevertheless, I made it to Oppenheimer with a friend at a big screen theater on opening weekend and to Barbie the next week with my Dear Wife. Both movies were wonderful, and the two movies were very, very different. But what did they have in common? They both benefited from being seen in a theater with an engaged audience.

Both Barbie and Oppenheimer were expected to do well, but no-one (except maybe Gerwig herself) expected either movie to be as successful as they have been.

Barbie  ended up taking first place in the box office, earning $162 million on its opening weekend, the best North American opening for a movie solo-directed by a woman. And Oppenheimer brought in $82 million, Nolan’s best opening for a non-Batman movie. Barbie unquestionably had the bigger opening, but it’s worth noting that Oppenheimer runs three hours plus trailers and so has fewer showings per day. It also is a dark, serious, R-rated WW II bio pic about the creator of the atomic bomb. Not exactly summer popcorn fare.

Now, three weeks following release, Barbie is still number-one at the box office, having brought in $459 million in North America and more than $1 billion globally. Oppenheimer has dropped to third place but still brought in $28.7 million for a domestic total of $228 million. On a budget of about $100 million, Oppenheimer has done an excellent $500 million globally.

So what does all this mean? It’s hard to read too much into this other than that in the summertime people love to go to the movies when there’s something new and interesting to go see!