Pink vs Black – Barbie vs Oppenheimer: Who does more at the US box office, the doll or the father of the atomic bomb? The duel has a winner.
In the US, the films “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” fought a duel at the box office. They officially started on Friday – now it’s clear: “Barbie”, the film by director Greta Gerwig, was able to sell more tickets and, according to initial estimates, achieved 155 million dollars on the opening weekend in the USA and Canada. Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” comes to around 80 million dollars.
This means that Barbie has already recovered the production costs of 145 million – not including the marketing costs.
The start of the film was accompanied by a lot of media fanfare, because the two blockbusters couldn’t be more different: Gerwig’s feminist-tinged Barbie in her pink world seemed to attract a mainly female audience, which, despite a lot of irony, was able to adjust to a rather light comedy. Nolan’s “Oppenheimer”, on the other hand, tells of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the construction of the atomic bomb.
There had been numerous memes on the Internet, and both films were mixed together into “Barbenheimer”. Fans posted that they wanted to see both films in a double feature in one day – the filmmakers and actors also fueled the competition, but also reported that they wanted to see both films.
More than $511 million worldwide
But the biggest winner is the cinema itself: the films grossed $235 million in North America and more than $511 million worldwide. “The pandemic is officially over,” headlined the New York Times, a signal that Hollywood has recovered from the pandemic. The cinemas would have had the best cinema weekend since the start of the Marvel film “Avengers Endgame” – that was in April 2019.
The joy should only be short-lived: the double strike by authors and actors could postpone the start of other blockbusters. Industry magazines are already reporting that the science fiction film “Dune 2” may be pushed into the coming year.