Metropolis Desk-
The resounding “yes” to the billion-dollar query is “Barbie.” According to official Warner Bros. projections, Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster has made an amazing $1.03 billion worldwide in just three weeks of release. Gerwig now holds the record for being the first female director of a $1 billion film working alone.
It’s not surprising that “Barbie” has done well considering she’s one half of the viral “Barbenheimer” craze. The doll’s extraordinary popularity is not at all unexpected given that she can stand on her own two feet.
Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore, said: “I’ve been in this game for 30 years and the Barbie and Barbenheimer phenomenon is as unprecedented as it was unpredictable.”
Dergarabedian claims that, historically speaking and without accounting for inflation, just 50 movies have made over $1 billion.
The marketing effort for the film, he continued, was the first indicator that “Barbie” would be a box-office success. “By its shared release date with “Oppenheimer,” the marketing campaign for “Barbie” started a series of events that resulted in the word “Barbenheimer” being added to the common lexicon, and that’s when we all knew something very special, and unique was going to create a much bigger than expected outcome for the movie not only for the opening weekend but for its global run in theaters.”
Margot Robbie, who not only starred in but also produced the film, revealed a vision she had at a studio greenlight meeting in a recent interview with Collider.
“I think I told them they’d make a billion dollars which, maybe I was overselling, but we had a movie to make!” she said.
“Barbie” was distributed by Warner Bros., which is owned by CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.
Its global success was driven by box office sales in some of the world’s largest movie markets, including the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Australia. The movie has been the No. 1 release in these markets every weekend since its release, according to tracking site Box Office Mojo.
“Barbie” also performed well in China, the second-largest market in the world and one that has become increasingly insular over the past few years. According to experts, franchise films like “Transformers,” “Fast and Furious,” and Marvel’s superhero movies tend to perform well with Chinese audiences. While “Barbie” is similar to “Transformers” in that it’s based on an existing toy, it’s “not an IP that generations of Chinese have grown up with, so you lack the intergenerational appeal that a film like ‘Barbie’ has in the United States,” said Michael Berry, director of UCLA’s Center for Chinese Studies.
But Berry, who researches Chinese cinema and pop culture, says Barbie is still iconic around the world, giving the movie a solid springboard for international acclaim.
“Children in hundreds of countries… have grown up with the dolls, her imagery… (but) the film exploits that name-recognition in a very savvy way by playing into both the Barbie lovers and Barbie haters,” he said. “The film is also able to deftly walk a tightrope that appeals to both naïve and wide-eyed eight-year-old dreamers, who approach the film on one level, and adult audiences, who can interpret the film on an entirely different level, full of irony, humor, sexual innuendos, and allegory.”
“Barbie” has become everything from a relationship litmus test to a celebration of womanhood for people who may have come for the hot-pink outfits and stayed for the film’s existential questions.
The movie “has tapped into cultural conversations about gender roles and female empowerment that isn’t bound by international borders,” said BoxOffice Pro chief analyst Shawn Robbins, “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.”
Source- CNN Business
