The Barbenheimer Cometh
The biggest movie event of the year is the strangest (and hopefully the best) in years.
Has anyone considered just how weird Barbenheimer is as a cultural event? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve booked my back-to-back tickets like everyone else: I’ll be joining my cadre of friends who are similarly excited for a cinema sensation that is probably the strangest to have taken place in the last decade — maybe more.
Seriously, consider how this Barbie/Oppenheimer experience has attracted a very sizeable chunk of the moviegoing public into a double-bill that features 1) a neon-pink musical comedy tracing the existential concerns of an American fashion doll, and 2) a dour three-hour epic documenting the creation of the atomic bomb — the cinematic equivalent of spending several hours circling the “It’s a Small World After All” Disneyland ride before immediately transitioning into the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.
That is verifiably insane. It’s also verifiably f*cking awesome. I, like much of the moviegoing public, am filled with unrepentant joy at a world so willing to partake in a movie event based substantially in layer upon layer of self-aware internet irony, and thrilled at the fact Barbenheimer ticket sales have doubled in the past week. This happened not because some insidious corporate marketing scheme, but because of a public thrilled at the basic irony of this release.
Consider the memes that have emerged around Barbenheimer. There have been memes about viewing schedules, memes about electoral maps, memes about fits to watch to each screening. Memes that have mashed-up movie posters, memes that spliced trailers together. The meme game, in other words, has been strong — strong enough to vault Barbenheimer into Wikipedia-page status.
This isn’t the first time the internet hive mind has made cinema phenomena into reality. Just two years ago, the “#ReleaseTheSnyderCut” internet movement gained enough steam to bring into existence Zack Snyder’s Justice League: a four-hour re-cut of 2017’s maligned Justice League. The Snyder Cut emerged from a fanbase furious at the production circumstances surrounding the original film, which involved studio interference, a family tragedy, and Joss Whedon. Suffice to say that the 2017 film was not a success, and Snyder fans — a dedicated bunch, to say the least — petitioned for a re-release of the film with the director’s original vision intact. It all culminated in Zack Snyder’s Justice League: a pandemic-era streaming release in which Warner Bros. didn’t just bring Snyder back for his re-cut; they also gave him $70 million to reshoot key scenes.
Barbenheimer is not at all the same thing as Zack Snyder’s Justice League, of course, one being a happy corporate accident while the other was a product borne of a singularly passionate fanbase. A better comp might be last year’s “Gentleminions” phenomenon: a TikTok trend that inspired middle- and high-school aged boys to dress up in three-piece suits while attending Minions: The Rise of Gru. Universal Studios received a spike in ticket sales from this weirdo movement, much the same way that Barbenheimer has surged an irony-laden double-feature to cultural prominence.
These internet-driven cinema events are an increasingly palpable feature of the moviegoing landscape, and seems to signal something of a change in how we judge industry success. Last week, I wrote about 2023 as a year in which mega-mega-budgeted legacyquels like Fast X and the fifth Indiana Jones movie have struggled to recoup their insane costs, seemingly due to audience disinterest in these decades-old franchises. And just as audience interest in old IP is growing sour, so too are the tracking numbers for original, event-driven ideas like Barbie and Oppenheimer surging to the forefront.
If you were a cynic, you could read Barbenheimer trend as a negative. If you were so inclined, you might argue that movies are less and less garnering success on the basis of stardom, spectacle, or — God forbid — their own merits, but instead on eccentric internet trends that marketing executives could simply never see coming. You could criticize audiences for their unwillingness to go to the movies for purposes of artistry or originality, for their interest only in watching movies when they are eventized and memeified.
I choose to be more optimistic. I’m delighted that Barbenheimer is gaining traction on the back of a corporate mishap: a beautiful accident of metamodern irony in which one movie based on a body-shaming toy line and another based on nuclear destruction were scheduled for a simultaneous release date. Twitter understood the joke, propelling it towards such public awareness that Variety got around to calling Barbenheimer “the movie event of the year.” In the same way Top Gun: Maverick swept the nation in 2022, so too is Barbenheimer looking to become this year’s around-the-barbecue conversation topic. And where Maverick offered the kind of escapism we all needed in a world recovering from a devastating pandemic, so too will the Barbie/Oppenheimer duo tap into a cultural zeitgeist that no one could have seen coming.
So grab your popcorn, buy your Barbenheimer t-shirts, and embrace internet irony for a weekend that might very well mark a shift in how movies are made. If these films explode with the kind of box office numbers that studios are projecting, we might be seeing a tidal wave of movies based on various Mattel toys including Hot Wheels and UNO. (One truly dystopic example includes a Daniel Kaluuya-starring Barney movie that will be an “Adult-Focused, ‘A24-Type’ Effort,” a terror-inspiring sentence.) If we’re lucky, we might begin to see a shift away from the endless parade of $300 million superhero franchises towards budgets that are slightly more manageable. We might even — and this is me spitballing here — get an original idea or two in our movie theaters.
Remember, Barbenheimer happened because Twitter willed it into existence. And Twitter, malformed creature that it is, does not produce these kinds of excited cinema events from boring old action franchises. Twitter latches onto the new and the weird — traits that Barbenheimer emblazons in radiant hot pink on the side of a 50-megaton nuclear bomb. Movie studios would do well to recognize this.
In Barbenheimer, we trust 🙌🙌🙌