Between the two of them, Oppenheimer and Barbie are bringing together the entire Hollywood acting pool, but it’s not necessarily the movie stars that are roping people into theaters this time.
Oppenheimer is the next major flick from Christopher Nolan, while Barbie is the first live-action attempt to bring one of the most iconic pop culture models to life on the silver screen. That’s not even mentioning the fact that the Margot Robbie-led ensemble is being helmed by Greta Gerwig – an extremely successful creative with movies like Lady Bird and Little Women to her name.
Social media has collectively decided to obsess over the fact that Oppenheimer and Barbie — as contrastive as they are — are releasing on the same day, leading to the cultural moment that we’re colloquially referring to as “Barbenheimer,” and it wouldn’t be an overstatement to suggest that “Barbenheimer” itself is now bigger than either of those film’s marketing machines.
The sheer number of viral memes circulating on social platforms every day, the utter absurdity of watching a movie about one of the biggest tragedies in the history of mankind and then following that up with a screening of a Barbie girl living in a Barbie world, and ultimately, the fact that those two films could both be genuine contenders for Best Picture is all helping the online community come up with a ton of humorous material.
But here’s the catch. The hype factors of those two pics, in and of themselves, should’ve been enough to generate a lot of box office buzz. And yet, these are extremely difficult times for cinema as a business model, so it’s not entirely unreasonable to assume both Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig will be thanking Warner Bros. and Universal before the month is out. Is that to say Oppenheimer or Barbie would necessarily flop at the box office, or even struggle to break even? Not really, but the fact that the movies are releasing on the same day and the distributors are not only okay with that, but even encouraging the comparisons, speaks volumes about how desperate the industry is getting amid this flurry of disastrous launches.
“Barbenheimer” isn’t a witty observation about Hollywood’s tonal and thematic range. It’s not even about experiencing two vastly different movies on the same day. “Barbenheimer” is the coming together of a people who have long missed the sensation of getting excited about cinema as a medium. Not a type of entertainment, mind you, or even a communal experience, but cinema as a form itself.
For years now, industry moguls have been saying that the theater experience is no longer a viable business model. Some big publishers even try to undermine the medium by pushing people toward streaming services. It was in fact for this very reason that Christopher Nolan parted ways with his long-time distributor — Warner Bros. — and found a new place for his films in the form of a contract with Universal. WB insisted on releasing Tenet and a number of other films at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic for HBO Max, but filmmakers like Nolan and Dune’s Denis Villeneuve tried to fight back against it.
And though we all would be quick to side with the directors on this, the publisher’s argument isn’t without its merits. When the pandemic hit, the moviegoing experience was among the first social activities to suffer a financial blow with strict health regulations. Even the general public was reluctant to put themselves at risk by going to a movie theater, and it was exactly at that time that people first realized they could have the same experience — well, almost the same — by sitting in their homes and watching films from the comfort of their couch. Not only would this be more comfortable and intimate, but also time-saving and cost-efficient. The average movie ticket now costs between $10 and $15 – and that’s not even considering factors like the commute and snacks. For the price of a single movie, streaming platforms allow you to watch hundreds, and in doing so take a lot of appeal out of the whole affair.
Cinema was already teetering on the thin precipice of irrelevancy with the introduction of the streaming model, and Covid was the small push it needed to plunge headfirst into crisis, waking the studios from their reverie. The box office never managed to climb to those same heights after the pandemic, and even superhero cinema — which was almost invincible up to that point — is now facing an uncertain future.
Sure, there are some exceptions. For every five films like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania or Shazam! 2, there is one Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. And if The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 indeed flop, well, that’s precisely why a movie like Oppenheimer is here. It’s not as if the movie needs Barbie to be successful, but the two are now in a peculiar position where they’re feeding into each other’s popularity. Many people will now try to watch both movies on the same day — if only for laughs — even if they’re not necessarily a Nolan fan, or vice versa.
Right now, cinema finds itself in a graver conundrum. With the ongoing Writers Guild strike, and the Screen Actors Guild joining them, most productions will once again hit pause. Hollywood is even partial to letting them ride this out because they know that even if the theater runs out of patrons, there’ll always be people who tune in for the content that’s currently available on their live-service platforms. Most movies that are currently in production might be delayed, but there are still hundreds of films and television shows to catch up on, whether it be Netflix, Disney Plus, or Max.
And with all of this casting a dark shadow on the future of filmmaking and this medium as an experience, one will begin to see why “Barbenheimer” is actually a stroke of genius. There’s still no way of predicting if the films will be able to keep a steady momentum and rekindle interest in the box office revenue potential, and indeed, these predictions have more often than not been off by a large margin. But if this bargain fails as well, then there’s no telling where the industry will be headed in the next couple of years.
After all, if even Christopher Nolan fails to generate enough interest for moviegoers — or for that matter, a picture about the world’s most popular doll headlined by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling — what chance do other filmmakers stand?
