This Barbie Is Death, Destroyer Of Worlds; The Age Of Barbenheimer

May 20, 2023

Toby Lynn Huter August 7th, 2023 - 8:08 AM

So are you Team Oppenheimer or Team Barbie? The age of Barbenheimer is finally upon us. From fan made t-shirts to posters, this might be the greatest fandom moment of the year. Barbenheimer is trending and memes have flooded through social media and has been popping up on ‘for you’ pages everywhere. Where did it all come from?

With the past twenty or so years witnessing the rise of the internet, fandoms and fan-run internet spaces have risen along with it, providing opportunities for people with similar interests to connect and engage in discussion over their chosen piece of media. Even this article you’re reading right now is an example of such discourse. However, in the early days of internet fandoms, fan culture mostly revolved around celebrity culture, and it was only with the popularity of the Twilight Saga that internet based fan accounts become more devoted to anything like books or movies. Hashtags and fan-lead accounts popped up all over, ushering in a new age for fandoms; Tumblr was in its heyday and Facebook was still all the rage as everyone deemed themselves #TeamEdward or #TeamJacob. With each film, the number of tweets and attention grew, thrusting mainstream fandom culture into, well, the mainstream and while Twilight changed the face of online fandom culture forever, it certainly didn’t see the end of it. The internet goes in and out of fandom phases, one day Fast and Furious is trending and the next Star Wars snatches back the attention. However, while the internet is home to some of the most thought-out and sophisticated analyses of the greatest films of the day, one of the most beautiful things about the age of the internet is the ability to not take itself too seriously all the time. That’s where Barbenheimer comes in.

Ironically, the creation of Barbenheimer was the result of a carefully thought out marketing technique; counterprogramming. Counterprogramming is used when a blockbuster film is being produced, and another film with a highly contrasting subject matter and genre is released on the same day to capture more attention and attract an underrepresented audience demographic. Historically, this strategy has been successful, instances can be seen just this past year with Top Gun: Maverick being released at the same time as The Bob’s Burgers Movie and Avatar: The Way of Water aligning with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. However, unlike these other examples, Barbenheimer caught the internet’s attention almost from the moment the release dates were made public. While the whole point of counterprogramming is to debut two films with differing subject matter, Barbenheimer seems like the most textbook example of opposing genres in existence. Even the contrast of the color schemes and posters make it appear that they were made to foil each other. The hilarity of this difference was really what attracted so many people to the possibility of a double feature.

Besides the counterprogramming attempt, speculation has also been made about whether or not the twin release dates was a move by Warner Bros, the company that produced Barbie in retaliation of Oppenheimer director, Christopher Nolan, leaving the company. The debacle goes back three years to when COVID was wreaking havoc on the film industry. In 2020, at the height of pandemic-induced terror, Christopher Nolan, who has also directed many other well-known films including Dunkirk, Inception, and The Dark Knight, had a new film, Tenet, locked and loaded, ready to hit theaters that summer. Nolan was sure that this would be the film that brought back the industry and fought to have it premier in socially distanced theaters. If you remember how 2020 went for any social industry, particularly theaters, you can probably guess how well that release went. Warner Bros, who had produced the film, lost around $50 million to $100 million simply because no one was willing to see it in theaters. Later, Warner Bros’ parent company, Warner Media, decided to put the film on HBO Max, a decision that Nolan strongly disagreed with. His next film, Oppenheimer, was slated to be produced through Universal instead, leaving no room for debate on how the decision would impact his relationship with the company he has been working with since his 2002 film, Insomnia. So, Warner Bros putting out their biggest film of the year on the exact day of Nolan’s comeback? Seems like more than a coincidence.

But if you subscribe to the Barbenheimer school of thought, it’s been a very happy past few weeks regardless of the potentially shady nature of the joint release dates. If Warner Bros was trying to take away from Oppenheimer’s success by releasing Barbie the same day, they definitely could not have predicted the internet’s taking to the Barbenheimer cause. While Barbie did outshine Oppenheimer’s domestic income with $162 million versus $82.4 million on the first weekend, their combined ticket sales made it the fourth highest domestic grossing opening weekend in history with $310.8 million. The Barbenheimer phenomenon is also credited with much of these sales, witnessing nearly a fifth of people who bought Barbie tickets also purchasing Oppenheimer tickets.

Even amidst the jokes and memes online about the contrast between the two movies and thus the necessity of seeing them together, Barbie and Oppenheimer have both been huge critical and commercial successes. Fan and internet meme culture played a huge role in their joint promotions, encouraging viewers to buy tickets just to fully interact with the community online. While production companies can do their best to promote films as much as possible, the extent to which the internet takes a piece of media and runs with it can really determine its success or failure. No one could have predicted just how much the world would love the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and the irony of the whole thing is that it was meant to capture differing tastes, but ended up creating an epic, over five-hour-long double feature instead. Film production companies can definitely learn a lot from Barbenheimer in terms of marketing strategies and joint project production. However, the possibility of counterprogramming that meets the levels of “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds, and he’s just Ken”? Unlikely.