Given just how much you’ve likely heard the words Barbie, Oppenheimer and Barbenheimer over the past couple weeks, it’s probably no surprise that the weekend’s hotly-anticipated movie double-bill had a huge box office opening weekend.
But exactly how huge are we talking, and how do the numbers compare to some of the other biggest movie weekends of all time?
On Sunday, film writer Jonathan Boehle (@jonathanmb32) broke down the headline figures and some of the records Barbie and Oppenheimer managed to set in a Twitter thread.
The fact that both movies did well isn’t necessarily a huge surprise. Barbie‘s marketing campaign was big and impressive, and the concept of Barbenheimer had people suddenly planning double features (UK cinema chain Vue said a fifth of ticketholders ended up seeing both movies). What is impressive, though, is just how well the two films did, setting a record for the first time a movie opened over $100 million and another opened at over $80 million in the same weekend.
As Boehle pointed out, when one movie opens at over $100 million in a weekend, the next best-performing film typically doesn’t even come close.
Barbenheimer isn’t the biggest top two of all time, but it’s worth noting that weekends that beat it typically have one movie that pretty much carries the number on its own — the record-breaking Avengers: Endgame singlehandedly raking in over $350 million in its opening weekend; the total gross for all movies that weekend was over $400 million.
In terms of other records set, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie now has the biggest opening weekend of all time for a female director, just sneaking ahead of Anna Boden’s Captain Marvel, which made $153 million in its debut weekend in 2019.
Overall, this marks the fourth biggest movie opening weekend ever after those of Avengers: Endgame and Infinity War, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens — all major Hollywood franchise films with steadfast, existing audiences, unlike Barbie and Oppenheimer.
With both the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) currently on strike, and uncertainty plaguing the summer release schedule, this may be the last time for a while we see numbers like this.
