**as of this writing, the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes are active and ongoing. The rich and wealthy only win when the rest of let ourselves be tricked into fighting with each other over unimportant minutia. The rich and powerful hold all the cards and are never to be trusted. Ever.**
**If art matters to you, do what you can to show support, and consider donating to the Entertainment Community Fund**
It started as just a funny, almost throwaway, "Haha, how weird are we" idea.
When I mentioned to my old Cinema Joes co-hosts that my wife and I would be in New York City late July, we figured we should make sure to meet up and see a movie. As it happened, we would be there just for the week of the 21st.
"Hey," said Alex, "That's Opening Day for Barbie AND Oppenheimer. Why not....see both?"
I figured nothing on Earth would be more hilariously incongruent that Greta Gerwig's Super Feminism spin on glitzy, plastic, pastel Barbie and the latest iteration of Nolan And His Serious Men Do Serious Things. I almost immediately starting joking about this being the „most perfect double feature since Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro.“
After awhile, though, I started to notice that we were not the only ones who'd stumbled onto this idea. Indeed, not only did the idea of a Barbie/Oppenheimer double-feature seem to be something a lot- a LOT- of people were seriously planning on doing, the jokes and memes and fake posters became such a viral hit that the inevitable mash-up name was soon coined.
And thus, Barbenheimer was born.
Well, Opening Day has come and gone- ours even including a pop-in by Greta Gerwig herself, for a healthy extra dose of unreality- and Barbenheimer is no dud. Indeed, it has proven itself a massive, potentially groundbreaking, social and cultural Moment on a scale I'm still struggling to wrap my head around. Both movies smashed opening weekend expectations and are still going strong. Barbie in particularly is steamrolling one record after another. As of this writing, it's already landed Gerwig the honors of biggest opening weekend ever for a female-helmed film, as well as the first-ever billion-dollar film directed solely by a woman, and I feel safe predicting it will end up the year's highest-grossing film. Oppenheimer won't reach quite the same highs- a 3-hour Nolan biopic was never going to hit the billion-dollar club- but it has kept pace in exceeding every prediction made and its success is just as inequivocable.
Barbenheimer is, indisputably, The Movie Moment of 2023.
Best part of all? The cherry on top? Both movies...happen to be good! Like, really good. Fucking amazing actually. Like, "If we didn't already have Spider-Verse out these would already top my Year's List" good. "I've already seen both films a second time and might just go a third time" good. (I'll stop now)
Beyond the memes and the staggering box office totals, it's the near-equal quality of both films that still has me in awe of the Barbenheimer phenomenon. It's rare enough for two movies to simultaneously capture audiences like this; I honestly can't remember an equivalent moment like this within my lifetime. It's even rarer for both those movies to not only be good, but "best of the year" good, maybe even "masterpieces for their respective genres" good.
We've had years where two or three separate films hit that Zeitgeist soft spot and proved real game changers, but never something like this, with two such films releasing on the same day and- rather competing for box office oxygen- somehow lifting each other up through some strange cinematic symbiosis. The release of the first Harry Potter and LOTR movies in 2001- with 9/11 still fresh in everyone's minds- might be the closest comparison from my lifetime, as it broke down the invisible walls that had previously kept fantasy out of the mainstream and arguably defined the template for franchise filmmaking that later made the Superhero Boom possible. But even that is but a faint comparison; the movies were not released at the same time, were never box office competitors, the internet (such as it was) was a whole different planet from today, etc. Plus, while the LOTR trilogy still stands as a masterpiece of filmmaking craft, the Harry Potter movies.....don't, and, well....let's leave it at that.
Now, I have also seen the articles and posts about some staggeringly strange and/or awful behavior from certain moviegoers that might have let the Barbenheimer juices get to their head. Or, as some have argued, perhaps in a „Post-COVID + Streaming World“, too many have just forgotten how to behave in a theater. Possibly true, possibly not, but I don't get the sense this is dimming the moment. There are always idiots about, and when huge numbers of people gather for something like this, there are bound to be a few more idiots too.
There is also cynicism about the films. Some say Barbie, no matter how good, can't overcome the fact that it was (very explicitly) envisioned by Mattel to be a spectacularly expensive toy commercial. Oppenheimer has been criticized as being far too apologetic about, or uninterested in, the costs of both Los Alamos (infringement on Native American rights, lack of radiation protection for workers and other locals) and the atomic attacks on Japan. Plus, any Nolan film is subject to (not wholly undeserved) scrutiny over how the story treats women.
Some of these critiques are fairer that others- and some fall into the „tell me you didn't watch the movie without saying you didn't watch the movie“ barrel- but for space's sake let's hold off the meatier thematic discussion for another post. What I'm trying to get at here is that even if one movie or the other falls short for certain viewers, and even if some people really have forgotten how to behave, there seems to be nothing quite able to dim the supernova of the moment.
And from where I'm standing, with all the worry and stress over the future of filmmaking and storytelling, the complications AI bring to the picture, all the absolute bullshit the wealthy powerbrokers of the industry are trying to pull in the face of historic strikes.....I think it's kind of beautiful and something of a fucking miracle for us to have this moment to enjoy, where two seemingly different (though, as I will later argue, not that different) masterpieces of the craft of filmmaking are here to remind us just how special movies can be, and how- box office records aside- much as the wealthy want to, you really can't put a price on that.
So let's enjoy it, everyone. I wasn't kidding when I said I was seriously contemplating a third go-around. Our world needs to be fought for, but we can't keep up the strength for it if we don't treat ourselves when we get a chance like this.
Noah Franc
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