The Real Meaning of ‘Barbenheimer’: If You Build Exciting Movies, They Will Come

When the history of movies in the age of streaming, COVID and the first double strike since 1960 is written, the day of July 21, 2023, will go down as the rare date thats actually remembered as a box-office landmark. For that was the day that Hollywood dropped two blockbuster weapons one pink, the other dark both of which hit their target audiences and went boom.

A downside of our franchise culture is that even when movies become big hits, their appeal often boils down to a basic expression of mass taste engineered by market forces. Look, the Jurassic Park concept worked again. Shocking! The Mission: Impossible series has a wild card tucked into its gamesmanship (youre not going to get AI to do what Tom Cruise does on a motorcycle),but once you look past Cruises stunt mojo, even the perfectly decent new M:I installment has been greeted by critics as the best action film of the summer. That made me think: Arent the Mission: Impossible movies supposed to be more than action films? Weve got Fast XXV: Fuel-Injected Diesel for that.

Which brings me to those pink and dark hit weapons. You could say that Barbie, by tapping into the appeal of the most famous doll of the 20th century, takes off from as iron-clad a piece of IP as any movie ever has. You could say, Okay, great, it made $155 million in three days but a Barbie movie was always going to have a built-in audience. Except that imagine if Barbie had been made in a standard way, by a standard filmmaker; it could easily have been a Smurf movie with better clothes. Barbie may be legendary IP, but the idea of a movie about Barbie, Ken and all their friends is not exactly a concept that lends itself to human dimensions (or to entertaining qualities as a movie for anyone over the age of 12).

For that, you need a filmmaker like Greta Gerwig, who summoned the industry power and the pop vision to transform Barbie into an exuberant jokey carnival of fourth-wall-breaking dolls-house-as-rabbit-hole feminist surrealism a candy-colored Dreamhouse burlesque that adores Barbie and resents her at the same time, that tweaks the patriarchy even as it treats Ken as the films most complicated character, and that has the wit to recognize that Barbie isnt just a plaything, shes a metaphysical projection of feminine ideals who also has the effect of undermining who women are.

Greta Gerwig, Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz and Margot Robbie on the Barbie set Jaap Buitendijk Thats a lot to unpack in a movie about a doll, but heres the point: Did Greta Gerwig simply sneak all that stuff into a Mattel movie that can still function perfectly well as a piece of product thats moving even more product off the shelves? Or did her playful subversive sensibility take a movie that was probably destined to be successful and turn it into something twice as successful? The buzz leading up to the release of Barbie was off the hook. I havent felt that level of anticipation since the era when the thrill wasnt yet gone from Star Wars movies. And Id argue that even though most of the people eager to see the film may not have known, going in, who Greta Gerwig was (though they will now), they picked up on what the Greta Gerwig-ness of the whole enterprise meant: that this was not going to be a cookie-cutter Barbie movie, that it was going to be a bowl of very spiked punch. It was going to be a movie that surprised you. Its that essential quality, not just the IP, that could make Barbie the biggest movie of 2023.

As an act of counterprogramming, the simultaneous release of Barbie and Oppenheimer plays like someones idea of a cosmic joke. Its not just that the two films make a perfect pair in their staggering lack of aesthetic and demographic overlap. Its that glommed together into the greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts entity known as Barbenheimer, the two movies seem to express the yin and yang of the 21st-century world. As a culture, were as serious as the atom bomb and as superficial as Barbie and we take our superficial playthings deadly seriously. If the box-office triumph of Barbie sends a crucial signal that inviting a gifted filmmaker to revel in the power of her idiosyncrasy works as a commercial proposition, the box-office triumph of Oppenheimer sends a different signal, reminding us that we still live in a heady and sober culture, one in which a three-hour talkfest meditation on the meaning of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, can seize audiences the way the movies of the 70s or 90s used to.

Cillian Murphy and Christopher Nolan on the set of Oppenheimer Melinda Sue Gordon Christopher Nolan is certainly a director with a built-in fan base. But its worth noting what the Nolan brand represents: filmmaking as an adventure into the unknown, as a movie you go to a theater to watch, as an experience thats larger than life, thats vastly bigger than you. The promise of Oppenheimer, and what I think is luring people out to see it in even greater numbers than expected, is that the film wont just be a biopic about the man who spearheaded the creation of nuclear weapons. It will be a movie about all of us, about what the creation of nuclear weapons did to us. Thats one reason you want to see Oppenheimer with an audience. IMAX, if you experience the film in that form, means a big screen, but the ultimate big screen is the collective consciousness of everyone in the theater.

These two movies, with nothing in common except the power and passion that got each of them made, have arrived at the perfect moment in our perfect storm of entertainment-industry meltdown. Long after their theatrical runs are over, Barbenheimer will stand as a touchstone that can remind everyone why we go to the movies: not just to relive some old IP but to dive into a vision, to live life for two hours (or maybe three) in the grip of an artist. Theres a lesson here, apart from buzzy fireworks of success, that the industry needs to remember and embrace. The lesson is that all of this works only when we give artists the license to follow their muse, to express the excitement of whats in their soul. Everything else is just algorithms.