‘Barbenheimer’ keeps breaking box office records.
Barbie and Oppenheimer – ie, Barbenheimer – were released on the same day, and now they’re sharing a similar trajectory at the box office.
READ MORE: The Barbie movie to ‘smash Oppenheimer at the box office’
Let’s start with Barbie.
Directed by Greta Gerwing, the movie just passed the $1 billion mark, setting the box office record for the best-performing movie by a female director.
Even though Barbie and Oppenheimer both largely qualify as ‘blockbusters’, it became immediately clear that the former would outperform the latter.
Within the first week, Barbie had already grossed $330 million, while Oppenheimer had ‘only’ grossed roughly $170 million.
At the time of writing, Barbie has grossed $1.031 billion.
Oppenheimer was filmed on a slightly lower budget ($100 million vs $150 million), and it has grossed $552 million so far.
But this too is a big deal because it means that Oppenheimer is now the highest-grossing World War II movie ever, having surpassed both Dunkirk and Saving Private Ryan.
Even though they both feature a stellar cast and Oscar-nominated directors, these two movies couldn’t be more different.
Barbie tells the story of the eponymous doll as she and Ken struggle to adjust to the real world.
Oppenheimer tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father’ of the atomic bomb as we know it.
There’s been so much hype around the Barbenheimer phenomenon that we almost forgot about another major Hollywood production that was released just a few days prior.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part I, starring Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, hit theaters on July 12.
The latest (and second-to-last) installment to the Mission: Impossible saga cost a whopping $291 million to make.
However, it has only grossed $493 million so far and it is unlikely to turn a profit.
According to CinemaBlend, Dead Reckoning’s lower-than-expected box office revenue is largely due to the fact that everyone prioritized Barbenheimer.
