Someone's already winning the Barbie vs. Oppenheimer box office battle

Looks like not even man made horrors beyond our comprehension can beat the power of plastic

By Emma Keates  |  July 19, 2023 | 3:08pm
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Someone's already winning the Barbie vs. Oppenheimer box office battle
Barbie vs. Oppenheimer Screenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures

With less than 48 hours to go until the big day, can we all just take a moment to step back and giggle about how truly silly the whole Barbenheimer thing is in the first place? These two huge releases that genuinely have nothing to do with each other will be forever linked in the world’s cultural imagination. There are a million and one memes. Tom Cruise is involved for some reason. Christopher Nolan kind of isn’t. It’s a day that will go down in history as much as Barbie herself and, well, probably not as much as the Manhattan Project, but you get the picture.

With all this hype around the “double feature,” it can be genuinely easy to forget that these really are two completely separate films that all 20,000+ participants had to purchase two individual tickets to see. Also, some people don’t actually feel compelled to spend 3 hours watching people’s faces melt off if all they really want to do is bop along to some Dua Lipa. (Crazy, we know.)

A lot of people felt this way, apparently, because Barbie is projected to pull in as much as $110 million at the box office this weekend—over two times as much as Oppenheimer, which is projected at $50 million (per Forbes).

In a genuinely surprising twist, however, these numbers would position Greta Gerwig’s hot pink epic as only the fifth highest-grossing release of the year, behind Disney’s The Little Mermaid ($118 million), Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 ($118.4 million), and Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse ($120.5 million).

The number one spot—if you can believe it—is still held by none other than The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which grossed $146 million in its opening weekend and broke a billion shortly after. We guess the real winners this year really are products. Cool!

 
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