The Barbenheimer fad has ballooned from a mere meme to a full-blown pop culture phenomenon with movie ticket sales to back it up. Barbie and Oppenheimer, two movies that could not be more opposite, happen to be releasing on the same day which spurred many to combine the names of the films to birth “Barbenheimer.” From there, Barbenheimer became the de facto way of describing seeing both movies as a double feature.
That all may sound like a lot of nuclear-irradiated hot air that people simply said on social media for a laugh, but it turns out to be translating to real box office returns. Only last week, 20,000 people bought tickets for Barbenheimer via AMC, as we previously reported. That figure has now doubled to 40,000 according to Variety.
There are many superficial reasons why the Barbenheimer phenomenon is taking off. Most notably, the double feature’s popularity is probably due to the stark juxtaposition of a movie based on a toy, Barbie, and another, Oppenheimer, being an existentially terrifying examination of humanity’s doomed love affair with nuclear weapons.
One film exudes the same vibe and look of bubble gum itself and the other is dusted with the aesthetic of its desert setting which reflects thematic notions of disintegrated former monuments to humanity’s lost greatness, Planet of the Apes-style.
However, if you ask me, the Barbenheimer trend is most likely a way for general audiences to signal that they love cinema itself and don’t want to see it die off. With the Oscar-caliber, but starkly different, directorial voices of Oppenheimer‘s Christopher Nolan and Barbie‘s Greta Gerwig behind each movie, this may be a message from audiences to movie studios that we don’t necessarily want all movie theater screens filled with CGI-fueled nostalgia grabs. Recent examples like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and The Flash can both be described as this and they both flopped in theaters, which I don’t think is a coincidence.
Both Barbie and Oppenheimer arrive in theaters on July 21.
