Barbie movie seeing unprecedented demand in Australia despite Oppenheimer clash
Could Barbie save the box office? Cinemas across Australia report that screenings of the Margot Robbie film have shattered all previous attendance records.
Could Barbie save the box office? After the unprecedented ticket demand for opening-week screenings, cinemas across Australia seem to think so.
The Greta Gerwig-directed film, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, opened in Australia on Wednesday to sold-out preview screenings nationwide.
Alex Moir, the head of marketing at Palace Cinemas, which has cinemas in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, and Byron Bay, says that the event preview screening of Barbie has shattered all previous attendance records. “It’s the highest-ever attended screening we’ve ever hosted, with 51 screens sold out,” he said.
At the Palace Verona cinema in Sydney‘s Paddington, all four screens are exclusively dedicated to showing the film. “It’s the most competitive environment for film and film demand since the pandemic,” he says. “In terms of the cultural zeitgeist, it is important to acknowledge that this could not have happened without a theatrical release.”
Another Sydney theatre, the historic, art deco Randwick Ritz, has sold every single seat in the complex for its preview screening “pink party” and is anticipating a crowd of 1500.
“This is something we have never seen before,” says Jaymes Durant, marketing manager of Moving Story Entertainment, which operates Classic, Lido, Cameo and Ritz Cinemas. ”It‘s become a pop culture phenomenon that’s taken everyone’s collective imagination. There is no stopping it. It’s a box office juggernaut for us.”
Hollywood desperately needs a weekend that exceeds box office expectations. 2023 was the year in which moviegoing was touted to make its comeback from the pandemic, which closed theatres for months on end and saw streaming service demand boom. Durant feels optimistic: “We’re excited that people seem ready to come back to the cinema and for movies to be at the front and centre of the pop culture conversation for what seems like the first time in years.”
He adds that the last film that had this kind of buzz was Top Gun: Maverick, which ended up grossing AUD $2.19 billion worldwide. “That was different because it had a slower build, word of mouth built the hype over time, and it had a really long tail,” he says. “Whereas with Barbie, it‘s this big explosion for the opening weekend.”
He says that with the release of Oppenheimer, the big-budget Christopher Nolan biopic about the creator of the atomic bomb, “almost all our cinemas are full of just the two films”, where they would usually screen 8 to 9. Which brings us to “Barbenheimer”: the most bizarre cinema stand-off in recent memory.
Both Barbie and Oppenheimer will be released on July 21. The films could not be more incongruous in tone or subject: Barbie, the atomic blonde, versus Oppenheimer, the atomic bomb. However, due to the shared release date, the internet has embraced them as a “double feature,” with some fans planning to see both films on the same day.
Bruce Isaacs, a senior lecturer in Film Studies at Sydney University, who has plans to watch Barbie and Oppenheimer as a double-bill this weekend, says that he can‘t remember the last time the box office has had a moment like this. “It is one of the most interesting weekends in cinema distribution in the last decade.”
He says that audiences are seeing this as an attempt to demonstrate the purity and necessity of going to the cinema to experience films. “You have to go to the movies to see Oppenheimer for the spectacle, and you have to see Barbie to plug into the cultural moment.”
Cinemas are not presenting the film as a double bill, but they tell The Australian that they have worked out the programming so that the audiences have the option of buying tickets to both with an intermission in between. While there is a strong indication that people are planning to see both films on the same day, Barbie is clobbering Oppenheimer in terms of pre-sales, drawing up to four times the audience.
Kristian Connelly, CEO of Cinema Nova in Carlton, says that “Barbie has become the event of the year.”
He anticipates that Barbie will beat the opening week of the James Bond extravaganza No Time To Die — which was a crucial test for Hollywood post-pandemic lockdowns. For the preview screening, the Cinema Nova has three theatres that completely sold out well in advance.
“I’m sure it’s going to be an absolutely hectic opening night,” he says. ”Frankly, we cannot add additional sessions fast enough. We’ve probably doubled our count of sessions for the opening week of presales.”
“It‘s a chance to welcome back audiences after a tough couple of months.”
Connelly too compared the hype for Barbie to the box office saviour Top Gun: Maverick, in the way that it “reminds people of the shared moviegoing experience and how different it is from watching content from your home.”
“Top Gun was a wonderful cinema experience where you vibed off the excitement of the crowd. Barbie is an event movie where audiences want to be a part of the conversation.”
He said that tickets for the film have particularly appealed to adult women and the queer audience. While there have been plenty of Barbie films made in the past, he notes, but this is her first big-budget outing — the film cost $213 million to make, not including marketing costs. It is also, as Connelly says, a Barbie movie “for adult fans”.
He praised the film as a “sophisticated, surrealist wonder,” that nods to cinema classics such as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. ”It’s a movie for movie lovers. If you are somebody that really knows your cinema, you will have such an amazing time.”
With the extraordinary success of Barbie and its potential to redefine the cinematic landscape, Connelly is hopeful that the film will pave the way for more daring, original productions. “I think there will be a lot of soul-searching in Hollywood. Hopefully, what we can all look forward to is people realising that cinema that strives to be original is what people actually want.”
He adds that the middling success of so many big franchise films, like The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which both bombed at the box office in the last six months, and the fervour surround Barbie and Oppenheimer, has shown that audiences need ”a mix of fresh among their franchises.”
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