'Barbie' Makes Box Office History

The power of the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer never stood a chance against the might of Margot Robbie's Barbie -- in box office terms at least.

Movie fans have been anticipating the juxtaposed pairing for months now as both films dropped in theaters on the same day. Both have received rave reviews from critics in the build up to release, but it looks like it's Barbie's world we're living in thanks to a huge weekend intake at the box office.

While the movies appear polar opposites in tone, the two big releases have been linked together with the viral term "Barbenheimer." The two films have been widely discussed across social media with fans sharing their plans view the movies as a back-to-back double feature experience.

As predicted by Newsweek, Barbie came out on top at the weekend's box office according to Deadline, taking in an estimated total of $155m while its more serious counterpart Oppenheimer took in $80m.

This means Greta Gerwig has broken the record for the largest opening weekend for a film with a female director.

The result isn't too surprising as the experts, betting companies and box office forecasters predicted the weekend would see a resounding win for Greta Gerwig's Barbie over Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer's intake at the box office shouldn't be seen as a failure though. In most weeks its intake of $80m would see it come in at no. 1; it's just unfortunate that on this weekend it has come up against the box office behemoth of Barbie.

While there is a seeming disparity in the total income of both movies, throughout their box office run, both seem destined to make back their respective budgets and then some. The New York Times reported that Gerwig's Barbie, released by Warner Bros. Pictures, had a budget of $145 million, while Nolan and Universal Pictures' Oppenheimer had a budget of $100 million.

Another fact to take into consideration when comparing the box office ratings of the two is the widespread appeal Barbie enjoys over Oppenheimer.

Barbie has been given a PG-13 rating by the Motion Pictures Association while Oppenheimer is has been rated R for its mature content. This means kids of any age can go and see Barbie too, as long as they're accompanied by an adult.

Barbie's dominance at the box office isn't a surprise to experts who anticipated a hefty win for the movie based on the classic toy.

Ahead of the weekend's releases, a spokesperson for social media management platform Hootsuite told Newsweek that based on social data they pulled from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube and more, they were expecting this result.

"At the Barbie premiere on July 9th, the movie received over 900,000 mentions on social [media]," the Hootsuite representative said. "The most notable Oppenheimer mention spike came on July 13th, when the cast left the [London] premiere of the movie to support the SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) strike. There were 183,000 social mentions online that day.

"Diving deeper, we decided to also look at conversations around each movie's main characters. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling together have received over 2 million mentions on social, while Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt have received roughly 500,000 mentions in the last 30 days."

Hootsuite suggested that Barbie had a $100 million budget for "marketing alone" which helped generate buzz around the movie's release.

While there appears to be a gold and a silver medalist in the box office for this weekend, the real winners are movie theaters. At a time when more and more big budget movies are launching exclusively on streaming services, putting a strain on the cinema industry, the release of two summer blockbusters on the same day can be seen as something of a throwback.

Movie theater chain AMC recently revealed that even before the launch of Barbie and Oppenheimer, more than 40,000 people had purchased tickets to watch both movies (the Barbenheimer double bill) on the day of release, according to The Guardian.