(Washington) The American box office is about to experience a striking contrast at its peak this weekend, with the most anticipated films featuring an iconic doll on one side and the inventor of the atomic bomb on the other.
Since Friday morning, hundreds of thousands of North American moviegoers have been rushing into dark rooms to watch Barbie And Oppenheimer.
Early numbers in the US and Canada point to one of the best weekends of the year for the industry.
The feature film on the pink doll has already accumulated more than 22 million dollars in receipts for the previews, 10.5 million for that around the first nuclear weapon, according to Boxoffice Pro.
And Barbie could end the weekend at 150 million, surpassing the performance of Avatar’s second installment last December.
“Expectations are so huge that what we are trying to determine is not whether it will be successful, but how big that success will be,” Boxoffice Pro editorial director Daniel Loria told AFP.
More than 200,000 spectators have even planned to go see one then the other on the same day by the end of the weekend, according to the National Association of Theater Owners.
“Like wildfire”
Already, the simultaneous screening of the two blockbusters has fueled a wave of jokes and diversions on social networks, spectators having fun considering their clothing transformation from one film to another, but also the appearance of a range of specific derivative products, a trend already nicknamed “Barbenheimer”.
The online communication strategy for Barbie has “taken like wildfire, attracting an entire generation as well as an underappreciated female audience,” while director Christopher Nolan is attracting his own die-hard fans, notes Shawn Robbins, chief analyst for Boxoffice Pro.
“They found themselves mixed in what seems to be an unexpected compendium of popular culture, which expressed itself through the phenomenon” Barbenheimer “”, he adds in an interview with AFP.
An effect that could “have heightened interest in the two films in a way neither of them would have achieved otherwise, if they had been released on different dates”, insists Mr. Robbins.
An opinion joined by David Gross, from the firm Franchise Entertainment Research, for whom the films will help each other rather than be in competition, by creating envy among moviegoers.
” A little crazy ”
“Cinephiles seize it and make it their own object”, according to David Gross, “I don’t remember such a phenomenon”.
” Oppenheimer is more aimed at men, the older ones, when Barbie rather targets women and younger people,” he said, “but I think everyone” can go see both.
“The cinema was full at 10:30 a.m. this morning, it was a little crazy,” says Eric Adams, a 27-year-old salesman in New York, who will go see Barbie at the end of the evening, for lack of tickets available at more usual times.
From Colorado, Emma McNealy, 35, says she would have rather watched Oppenheimer streaming from home, but that the discussions about “Barbenheimer” around her pushed her to return to the big screen.
Hollywood, despite the ongoing double strike among screenwriters and actors, is also getting caught up in the game.
Tom Cruise, on the poster of a new opus of Impossible mission, said on Twitter his enthusiasm for the two films. In return, the director of BarbieGreta Gerwig, and the star in the title role, Margot Robbie, showed up with tickets to the Tom Cruise film.