I’m a Barbie girl, in an Oppenheimer world

In an age of streaming and TikTok, the idea of seeing any double-header at the theater feels absurd, let alone two movies as diametrically opposed as Barbie and Oppenheimer.

And yet, by the power of memes, “Barbieheimer” is here (or “Oppenbarbie,” depending on which you see first).

🎀💣 How it started… The two films both open across America on June 21. That fact, combined with how different they are from one another – Barbie, a fun, under-two-hours bubblegum power anthem, and Oppenheimer is a three-hour saga about the man who invented the nuclear bomb – and you’ve got a match made in Twitter meme heaven.

But then from the seemingly endless eruption of, frankly, surprisingly high-quality memes, an overarching narrative emerged – seeing both films, back-to-back. And in what can only be described as an unwavering commitment to the bit, people started actually buying tickets to both films.

• According to AMC, the largest theater chain in the country, over 20,000 moviegoers have purchased tickets to see the two films on the same day. That’s about $220k in revenue per film, though, the real value for the studios is the free marketing they’re getting from the “Barbienheimer” saga.
• Barbie is projected to gross about $80-100 million in opening weekend sales, while Oppenheimer is projected to bring in about $40-$50 million.

🍿 Zoom out: With other summer tentpoles like Indiana Jones 5 underperforming at the box office, the unlikely duo of Barbie and Oppenheimer will have their work cut out for them to pick up the slack. This year’s summer box office so far is ~$1.88 billion, which is 1.7% lower than 2022 levels across the same period.