Barbie and Oppenheimer movies rake in $759.7 million at the box office
Cinemagoers turned out in force, with Barbie and Oppenheimer delivering the fourth-highest-grossing weekend in history.
Cinemas across Australia are reeling after audiences turned out in force for the Barbenheimer weekend.
Barbie and Oppenheimer — the formidable Barbenheimer duo — raked in $AUD 759.7 million at the global box office this weekend. In Australia, Barbie collected $21.5 million, including a slew of long sold-out previews on Wednesday night, while Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer took in an impressive $9.4 million.
Both films emerged as saviors for cinemas still recovering from the pandemic. Alex Temesvari, Head of Programming at the Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace in Sydney’s Cremorne, tells The Australian that the Barbenheimer opening weekend was “a massive weekend for cinemas right across the country.” It was the highest-grossing weekend for The Orpheum in its 88-year history.
“Oppenheimer broke records to have our #1 opening of all time, and Barbie came in at #2 for the opening of all time,” Moir says. The Orpheum is one of the select few cinemas in the country that is running Oppenheimer in 70mm, ”which really added to our demand for that film as Christopher Nolan is an old school film enthusiast, and it is his preferred format for people to see the film in.”
Alex Moir, the head of marketing at Palace Cinemas, which has cinemas in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, and Byron Bay, says that the Barbenheimer weekend is ”officially our highest-grossing weekend of trade ever across the Palace Circuit.” Moir says that the theater is ecstatic with the turnout: “We‘re seeing customers say that it’s their first time back at the cinema in a while,” he says. ”It has really reinvigorated cinema culture.”
At the Cinema Nova in Melbourne, an independent theater that specializes in arthouse cinema, Barbie broke the record for the biggest opening week of all time in four days — a record that was held by Wes Anderson‘s 2014 film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. “It was an absolutely blockbuster weekend for both films,” Kristian Connelly, CEO of Cinema Nova, tells The Australian.
Though it hasn’t yet reached the seven-day mark since the release of Barbie and Oppenheimer, Connelly predicts that the cinema is set to break its all-time record. “The interesting quirk is that the record is currently held by the first week of January in 2020, which coincided with the opening of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. She [Gerwig] has basically given us our two biggest opening weeks of all time.”
Gerwig’s cotton-candy pink fantasy collected a global total of $500.8 million in its opening weekend. The film, in which Margot Robbie executive produced and stars as the eponymous doll alongside Ryan Gosling, scored the biggest opening ever for a non-franchise film. It also landed the top opening of 2023 to date.
The Oscar-nominated Gerwig, who co-wrote Barbie alongside her husband, filmmaker Noah Baumbach, broke the US box office record for the biggest opening for a female director, earning $230 million, surpassing Captain Marvel, which was co-directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck and previously held the title after earning $227.4 million in 2019. Wonder Woman, directed by filmmaker Patty Jenkins, had previously held the record as the highest-grossing movie solely directed by a woman, with its $153 million debut in 2017.
“It‘s remarkable what the studio and Mattel let the filmmakers get away with,” says Connelly.
“It’s extraordinary in terms of how it really swings for the fences. There could have been the temptation to make a safer film. But by making something that really speaks to the moment and packaging it in this beautiful fuchsia design, they’ve managed to create something that I think has real lasting cultural impact rather than something that’s a hit that people stop talking about six months later.”
Connelly hopes that the success of the Barbenheimer weekend will encourage people to “come back to the movies” for good. He notes that the Australian horror film Talk To Me, a directorial debut from Adelaide brothers Danny and Michael Philippou — which was picked up at Sundance by the hotshot independent production company A24 — will arrive at the cinema on Thursday. “We’ve been particular in terms of making sure that we expose these films to our audiences so that they can make the decision about the next film they’re going see after they’ve seen Barbie and Oppenheimer.”
Christopher Nolan’s epic three-hour historical drama, Oppenheimer, brought in a global tally of $258.7 million from 78 markets. The film was massive for Australia’s only IMAX cinema at Melbourne Museum, setting a record for advance ticket sales at 27,000.
Both films exceeded their already-stratospheric box office predictions. According to the National Association of Theatre Owners‘ (NATO) magazine Box Office Pro, Barbie was anticipated to rake in anywhere between $208 million and AUD $260 million during its opening three days, while Oppenheimer was projected to earn $77 million to $107 million. It was the strongest overall box office take since before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The record-breaking box office performance is, in part, due to the phenomenon known as Barbenheimer, in which hundreds of thousands of pink-clad and mid-century suit-donning moviegoers opted to watch a double feature of Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day.
“People recognised that something special was happening, and they wanted to be a part of it,” Michael O’Leary, president, and CEO of the National Association of Theatre Owners, told CNBC.
“Our partners in the creative community and at the studios gave audiences two uniquely different, smart, and original stories that were meant for the big screen, and movie lovers responded by gathering friends and family and heading to their local movie houses across the nation.”
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