‘Barbenheimer’ Poised to Deliver a Blowout Weekend

“Barbenheimer” has arrived, a combination of blowouts and blowups that is giving the theatrical movie business a sorely needed summer jolt.

Early ticket sales and box-office tracking suggest the dual release of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” could help deliver the strongest U.S. box office weekend of the year.

Presales for “Barbie,” the Margot Robbie -led comedy about the statuesque dolls and their search for meaning, outpaced all other films this year at the same point in the sales cycle, according to the Boxoffice Co., which provides schedule and ticketing services for the movie industry. “Barbie” also posted a much higher rate of tickets per transaction compared with typical movies, meaning more people are seeing it in big groups, Boxoffice said.

“It’s unprecedented to see presales like this for an original comedy,” said Marine Suttle, the company’s chief product officer. “It’s performing like a superhero movie.”

The movie industry has been hoping for a shot of adrenaline as it still recovers from the pandemic, with some highly anticipated films still struggling to draw crowds to theaters. Until recently, the phenomenon of a big blockbuster weekend seemed like a thing of the past, unachievable in an age in which bingeing on the couch had largely replaced going to the movies. 

The fan enthusiasm surrounding “Barbie,” and the World War II drama “Oppenheimer,” from Comcast’s Universal Pictures, is a breath of fresh air for studios and exhibitors, who are coming to terms with the effects of two Hollywood strikes that could drag on for months and are already leading to significant production delays.

Domestic box office sales have been $5.1 billion so far this year, 12% higher than the same period a year earlier, but 22% lower than during that period in 2019, before the pandemic, according to Comscore.

Outside the AMC theater in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday night, groups of women dressed in pink spandex ate cheeseburgers and drank cocktails before preview showings. At a Wednesday screening at L.A.’s Westfield Century City mall—where several scenes in the movie were shot—neon-clad Barbie fans posed for photos in front of an “Oppenheimer” poster.

Ynon Kreiz, chief executive officer of the toy company Mattel, which owns the rights to Barbie and co-produced the movie through its Mattel Films unit, attributed the accelerating momentum to a frantic marketing push by his company and Warner Bros. Discovery.

Mattel promoted the movie through displays at stores where Barbie dolls are sold and by striking brand partnerships with 160 retailers worldwide. That included the mall stalwarts Hot Topic and Bloomingdale’s, as well as global partners such as Nestlé México and Krispy Kreme Philippines, which sold “Barbie”-themed doughnuts with turquoise frosting and pink sprinkles and a blue and pink streaked “Cotton Candy Chiller” frozen beverage.

“The theme was to create a cultural event,” Kreiz said. “This was not about just marketing a movie.”

Months ago Warner Bros. Discovery identified “Barbie” as an opportunity for cross-company promotion across its TV networks, a priority under CEO David Zaslav. At weekly meetings on the Warner Bros. lot, top executives discussed how to create a “Summer of Barbie.”

Zaslav, who has championed the theatrical movie business despite the rise of streaming, has given priority to certain content to get an all-out companywide push, people close to the company said, with “Barbie” as the latest example.

The result was a campaign that involved a “Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge” show on Warner Bros. Discovery’s HGTV network, a sneak peek of the movie during the NBA Conference Finals on its TNT channel, a “Barbie’s Dream Weekend” on TBS and a Barbie-themed episode of the Food Network show “Summer Baking Championship.”

Fans have responded enthusiastically, even some who never played much with Barbie dolls growing up.

Jemellee Santos,

She said she grew up playing sports and attending baseball games with her father. During the past year, after major life changes, and as Barbie popped up in her social-media feeds, she has increasingly felt drawn to the Barbie ethos and has started buying more clothes in pink and purple. 

“This was a part of my childhood that I kind of missed out on, because I had no interest in it. I really wasn’t a girlie girl,” Santos said. “Right now, nostalgic things like Barbie are what make me happy.”

Studio chiefs and theater owners have salivated as tracking estimates for the “Barbie” opening-weekend debut grew from $70 million in late June to more than $100 million just a few weeks later. The opening weekend projection for Barbie jumped further to between $170 million and $189 million by July 20, the day before its official release, according to The Quorum, a film data and research company.

Theater owners have created themed cocktails and special launch events. Marcus, a publicly traded cinema chain based in Milwaukee, hosted “Barbie Blowout” parties, some of them with human-size Barbie doll boxes in their lobbies for photo opps.

Greg Marcus, the chain’s CEO, wore a blond Barbie wig and a pink feather boa for a TikTok video promoting the movie. “I’ll do anything to help sell a movie,” Marcus said. “But not gonna lie, I did feel a little goofy.”

Marcus called the early success of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” a “validation of the theatrical model” because of strong presales and high interest from groups.

“There’s something to getting off your rear end and leaving your house and making an appointment,” he said. “You’ve made an investment.”

B&B Theatres, based in Missouri, offered a Maker’s Mark and Fireball cocktail for “Oppenheimer” moviegoers called The Bomb. At LOOK Cinemas, Barbie-themed cocktails were batched in 50-gallon barrels. 

The company’s C-suite executives helped tear tickets and clean up trash because of demand. Groups of 30 people at a time have snapped up seats. Presales for LOOK Cinemas were the highest since Covid-19 shut down auditoriums, said CEO Brian Schultz, whose chain includes around 120 screens in several states.

The National Association of Theatre Owners said that roughly 200,000 people bought tickets to see both “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” on the same day. The association’s general counsel, Jackie Brenneman, called the trend known as “Barbenheimer” an unprecedented phenomenon because of how different the two titles are. 

It is a welcome twist to a story line Schultz and other exhibitors have lived through since Covid-19 broke the moviegoing habits of millions of Americans.

Once theaters reopened, horror movies and superhero spectacles rushed back in—but certain genres weren’t represented at the multiplex, such as family films and R-rated romantic comedies, said Schultz. 

The number of screens in the U.S. fell about 5% since Covid-19, from more than 41,000 in 2019 to just over 39,000 at the end of last year, according to the theater association.

Among the theaters that ran into financial trouble in the pandemic was the four-screen Caribou Theater in northeastern Maine. Owner Arlen Dow sold it earlier this year, keeping a three-screen complex called the Braden Theater in nearby Presque Isle, Maine.

Bouncing back from the Covid-19 closures was tough, said Dow, especially when a competitive labor market led him to more than double the hourly wage he paid the high-school seniors who work the concession stand. Now that he is down to one theater, operations are profitable again, though he has had to cut back the number of showings and stays closed Mondays and Tuesdays. 

This weekend his three screens showed the top three movies in the U.S.: “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer” and “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One.” He is thinking about opening back up seven days a week.

“We’ve got to start looking at this again now that people are coming back to the movies,” he said. 

—Amol Sharma and Joe Flint contributed to this article.

Write to Robbie Whelan at [email protected] and Erich Schwartzel at [email protected]