Three weeks in and Barbie has reached $1.03 billion globally according to Warner Bros. Estimates. Greta Gerwig is now the first solo female director to have a billion-dollar film.
Barbie’s success is not unexpected. Senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian said that in his 30-year career, “Barbenheimer” was “as unprecedented as it was unpredictable.” After adjusting for inflation, only 50 films in history have hit this mark.
Its marketing set it up for box office success thanks to the Barbenheimer meme since Oppenheimer was released simultaneously and was drastically different from its pastel counterpart. “It was a bigger-than-expected outcome,” says Dergarabedian.
Margot Robbie, the producer, and star, said in the pitch to the studio that the movie could make a billion dollars. In an interview with Collider, Robbie said, “I think I told them they’d make a billion dollars which, maybe, I was overselling, but we had a movie to make!” Little did Robbie know, this was not an oversell, and the movie stayed at No. 1 in the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Australia since the release.
Barbie has also done well in China, possibly because it is a similar type of toy movie like Transformers, which performs well overseas. However, Michael Berry, director of UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, said that Barbie is still iconic worldwide even if it is not a familiar toy in China.
Barbie can walk a tight line between Barbie haters and lovers and children and adults. Shawn Robbins, BoxOffice Pro chief analyst, said, “Driving that discourse is the film’s embrace of what generations of women have both loved and hated about the brand and what it’s often represented in the past.” Barbie has encouraged stimulating conversations about gender and female empowerment.
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