Chris Pizzello/AP Photo
Moviegoers celebrate Barbenheimer weekend at AMC The Grove 14 theaters in Los Angeles.
There is a 6 a.m. screening of Oppenheimer this weekend at the IMAX 70mm screen in the famed Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, the one that has the plaster handprints and footprints of movie stars out front. At the same theater, Barbie is showing 20 times per day.
Last weekend’s box office numbers featuring releases of the two juxtaposed hits made for the highest North American money haul since Avengers: Endgame in 2019, and the fourth-largest ever. The two films driving the surge managed that without a number at the end of their titles. Should they make it to the Academy Awards’ writing nominations, they would both presumably be in the category of Best Adapted Screenplay, Barbie based on the Mattel character and Oppenheimer on the Kai Bird/Martin Sherwin book American Prometheus. But both are original works, and in that they constitute a pronounced break from the kind of blockbusters Hollywood has churned out for the last decade or more, which typically feature superhero costumes or space modules. Amazingly, studio executives now have to relearn an adage of cultural entertainment: that audiences might be attracted to something they haven’t seen before.
The obvious backdrop for this resurgence of moviegoing can be witnessed on the picket lines in front of every studio in town, where actors and writers are protesting a broken system. Even as Disney honcho Bob Iger was expressing dismay at the “disruptive” labor actions “adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing,” two films with unique storytelling were setting box office records.
Much ink has been spilled on the lessons of “Barbenheimer weekend,” and how it shows a new path forward for the industry. But I don’t think that’s been fully explored. It’s not just that this validation of creativity should lead studio heads to settle with the names on the marquee; it’s that it calls into question practically every move the industry has made lately. Whether this will matter even a little, however, is a different question.
The real stars of Barbie and Oppenheimer are its director auteurs, Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan. But before you interrupt to say that the Directors Guild was the one union this year that reached agreement on a contract in Hollywood, note that these directors also wrote their films (Gerwig in tandem with her partner Noah Baumbach). The singular visions on display came out of the writing, while new writers who yearn to reach that level now must suffer on minimized staffs and in McJobs, denied the opportunity for the on-set training needed to become the next great showrunner or director.
And yes, the fact that a female director is a phenomenon, unbelievably, still rare in Hollywood (despite the fact that she delivered a nine-digit opening weekend) is also a testament to studio myopia.
Barbenheimer weekend disrupts the entire project that the studio heads have been building toward, the fusing of Hollywood with Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
But there’s more to it than that. The dominant mode of thinking in the industry is market segmentation. There are women’s pictures, family pictures, adult dramas, and not much overlap between them all. This has been the case for several decades. But Barbenheimer weekend blew that away. It might surprise some that the Barbie opening-weekend audience was only 65 percent female, given its bright-pink style and feminist undercurrent. Warner Bros.’ own distribution chief said his film was expected to track at 90 percent female. Oppenheimer, a war epic about the making of the atomic bomb, was 62 percent male, also below expectations.
The prevalence of double features, the crossover audience for two films that by typical standards aren’t supposed to overlap (200,000 ticket buyers did book specific double features according to box office estimates), shows that people of all ages, genders, and outlooks will flock to good films, regardless of how they are targeted.
Hollywood has made its pictures in recent years with the Chinese market at top of mind. Action-heavy films with minimal dialogue have been favored. But Oppenheimer, with its dialogue-driven drama, doesn’t have a release date in China yet, and Barbie, a comedy that relies on some familiarity with American culture, didn’t open well there at all. A strange controversy about a quick shot of a hastily drawn map that allegedly shows China’s “nine-dash line,” which refers to the ownership of islands in the South China Sea and got the film banned in Vietnam, was theoretically an example of Hollywood bending over backwards to Chinese gatekeepers. But Chinese audiences didn’t see it that way—at least, not enough to make them actually see the picture.
The point here is you can make lots of money in film without always catering to Chinese tastes, that cookie-cutter superhero movies and explosions don’t have to drive every cinematic experience, that boring audiences with conformity to make it past the Chinese censors maybe isn’t the sole path to success.
But the biggest revelation from that big weekend was that it happened outside of people’s homes, in theaters, in nothing less than a cultural event. People are dressing for the occasion, even in places as far away from the American epicenter as Russia. There are pregame parties and postgame discussions. It feels like a common cultural moment.
This is coming out of an entertainment industry that has spent the last decade trying to individualize the experience of watching films, which has since its inception been a communal event. Following the norms of live theater that predated it, the mode and some of the appeal of the movies has been to watch on a big screen with a bunch of strangers in a darkened room. Home video and cable chipped away at that, the pandemic nearly killed it off, and streaming tried to completely change that context, using the algorithm to personalize entertainment consumption.
Audiences last week said resoundingly that they didn’t want that. They wanted to experience a common story; they wanted to watch and react and laugh and cry and even argue together. They wanted this even more after years of self-imposed isolation. And they didn’t want the algo telling them what fit their tastes, what they “should” watch. They even took in other films at higher levels over the weekend, suggesting that not just two original openings drove them to the multiplexes, but the experience of moviegoing itself.
In other words, Barbenheimer weekend disrupts the entire project that the studio heads have been building toward, the fusing of Hollywood with Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the consolidation of entertainment. That includes the vertical integration of production with distribution through streaming, the concentrated studio conglomerates dictating theater choices and the similarly concentrated theater chains eagerly agreeing, the end of experimentation in favor of the blockbuster and the algorithm.
Streaming hasn’t even worked financially for the studios. But it did get them out of having to pay residuals, which has so impoverished creative talent to the point that they’ve walked off the job simultaneously for the first time since 1960. Creatively, it has homogenized the business, making everything a reach for “existing IP” (intellectual property; in other words, sequels and franchises). The talent doesn’t know what’s working because the streaming data is proprietary. And rather incredibly given the business model, it’s made bunches of series and films harder to find.
Overall, it has brought a more ruthless finance mentality to a creative industry. As Matt Stoller puts it, “In an attempt to monopolize, studio-streamers accidentally transformed a high-wage, high-profit business into a low-wage low-profit commodified one.”
To the extent Barbie and Oppenheimer share any theme, it’s that new inventions made with bright hopes can have downsides; both depict the moral struggles of coming to terms with them. (That anyone thought Oppenheimer was going to be about cool engineering is astounding.) That’s surely true of Hollywood today. Those in power are breaking America’s last great manufacturing product, but the real talent in the industry still can defy that and restore some glory. And when the market is given the opportunity to speak, it speaks for the talent, for originality, and against the studio mindset.
Like Matt Zoller Seitz, I don’t have a lot of hope that these lessons will be learned. Studio execs appear determined to stick to the wrong ones; there are 14 different Mattel toy tie-ups being produced right now. Maybe they’ll just assume that a marketing blitz can drive people to the theaters. Warner Bros. used its array of networks to relentlessly promote Barbie, for one of the first times. Maybe the lesson will be to drown people in hype. Maybe that will even be correct.
But maybe the fact that these films broke records while the talent who fostered them screamed from the picket lines that the life was being squeezed from the movies will be impossible to ignore. The coalition in favor of good entertainment is broad; you can apparently make over $300 million off them in one weekend. Humans have loved to watch stories together since ancient Greece. That’s a lesson we shouldn’t have to relearn.
