Does the Barbenheimer phenomenon ring any bells? It’s the summer of 1995. The world pretends to be on tenterhooks as Blur’s Country House goes up against Oasis’s Roll With It. Will the middle-class beatniks sell more than the cheeky, working-class Mancs?
No, that doesn’t quite work as a parallel for the concocted battle between Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Neither director is exactly a horny handed child of the soil. The supposed gender divide isn’t there with the pop battle. And, if we’re honest, the two films – unlike the bands at that time – aren’t really in neck-and-neck commercial competition.
If the box-office projections are right the battle won’t even be close. Nolan’s sprawling study of J Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, is expected to land an opening-weekend haul in the US of about $40 million (€35.5 million). Gerwig’s postmodern take on Mattel’s fashion doll should land closer to $90 million. One is bright and fun. The other is about the end of the world. What else would you expect? That reads less like Blur v Oasis than Tindersticks v Oasis. (No offence intended to the Mancunians’ splendid Nottinghamshire contemporaries. We’re just talking vulgar revenue here.)
Also, the earlier dispute was not identified by a portmanteau noun. That craze didn’t really kick off until “Bennifer” was devised for the romance between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in the opening years of this century. It is not clear who first coined “Barbenheimer” or when the term first appeared. You may as well ask who invented the axe. From the moment the rivalry was established that was always going to happen. It materialised spontaneously like morning dew. Then came T-shirts. Then came internet memes.
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You could begin the story with Nolan’s divorce from Warner Bros. The studio had distributed all his films internationally since Insomnia in 2002. During the pandemic, however, the director expressed objections to Warners policy of releasing its upcoming releases directly on to the HBO Max service. He noted that he and colleagues had gone to bed thinking they “were working for the greatest movie studio [but] woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service”. Ouch!
Some months later it emerged that Oppenheimer would be distributed by Universal Pictures. As far back as October 2021, that studio confirmed the biopic would arrive on July 21st of this year. Fast forward to the CinemaCon gathering at Las Vegas in April of 2022. Warners then announced that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie would take the space previously allotted to its delayed Road Runner feature Coyote vs Acme. It took a while for the world to realise that it would, thus, be released opposite their former ally’s historical epic.
It is worth recalling how Barbie was then perceived. When the news hit that Gerwig would follow-up her Oscar-nominated adaptation of Little Women with a film based around a plastic doll there was much anxiety about a respected film-maker “selling out”. Wasn’t this akin to making a Transformers film? The publicity machine has, since then, done an extraordinary job of upgrading expectations.
Leaked photos of Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Ryan Gosling (Ken) on the set ignited furious excitement. The arrival of her romantic partner Noah Baumbach, the man behind Marriage Story, as co-writer confirmed the couple were taking their potential frivolity seriously. Everything that has emerged since points to a self-referential satire of contemporary consumer society. Screenings have been few and far between. But Gerwig was always there to claim such prestigious influences as Jacques Demy’s Model Shop, Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire and Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death. An early trailer spoofed 2001: A Space Odyssey. The message was clear. This is a film for Barbie heads and for cineastes. And for people who identify as both.
[ Everyone needs to calm down about Barbie. Including meOpens in new window ]
When it was first announced the films would go up against one another many suspected that one, or the other, would move. But, as 2022 became 2023, it became increasingly clear that the two were locked in a symbiotically beneficial grip. The supposedly discrete demographics had more crossover than glib reports initially suggested. It was reductive to think male audiences would show no interest in a lively comedy that took a sideways look at its own intellectual property. It was positively insulting to suggest female audiences would turn away from a film about the race for the atomic bomb. Cillian Murphy, who plays Oppenheimer, was drawn into the conversation. “My advice would be for people to go see both, on the same day,” he said. “If they are good films, then that’s cinema’s gain.”
The strategy has been described as “counter-programming”. This is the notion that it is good business to counter a high-profile release aimed at a particular audience with an entertainment aimed at those supposedly uninterested in the first film’s key concerns. Nolan himself has was involved in a classic of the genre. In 2008, The Dark Knight, grim Batman flick, went up against Mamma Mia!, bouncy Abba musical. Both prospered.
We are, however, now in a very different area. Theatrical exhibition is spluttering. This year, The Flash, Elemental and Shazam! Fury of the Gods have all taken less than expected. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a staggeringly expensive addition to the franchise, was described by Forbes magazine as a “theatrical misfire”. Despite rave reviews and the presence of a hitherto indestructible Tom Cruise, even Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One arrived last week to what Variety called “a lacklustre start” (though worldwide Cruise enthusiasm might save it).
If Barbie and Oppenheimer can both make money – and, at time of writing, that seems plausible – their audiences may reasonably be classed in the same demographic. The cohort in question is “people who still go to the cinema in hordes”. Perhaps, the real counter-programmed title this week is My Name is Alfred Hitchcock. The distributors of Mark Cousins’s fine documentary really are playing a different game to Warners and Universal.
So, all the chatter about Barbenhiemer is creating a feedback loop that benefits both productions? When Tom Cruise explains that he is seeing both on the same day it ensures all screens in your local Enormoplex will be groaning? Yes and no. As is ever the case with largely online fluff, the conversation will have left most of the wider population behind. Survey those emerging from either film and, as sure as eggs are eggs, most will be no more familiar with the “Barbenheimer” than they are with terms from quantum mechanics (or whatever is the equivalent in the Barbie-space).
Blur won the battle. But Oasis won the war.
Oppenheimer and Barbie are in cinemas from July 21st (obviously)
