Barbie, written and directed by Greta Gerwig. Starring Margot Robbie. USA, 114 minutes, IIA. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

In case you’ve been under a rock, we have just experienced the Summer of Barbenheimer. The memes have been everywhere since the July 20 releases of what turned out to be the season’s two biggest films — indie sweetheart Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, and technical maestro Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. 

For the uninitiated, “Barbenheimer” is a portmanteau coined to highlight what most industry experts call counterprogramming — the “female-skewing” Barbie was positioned as a salve to Oppenheimer’s mammoth, manly proportions. Projections on July 19 saw a roughly $90 million US bow for Barbie, and around $50 million for Oppenheimer.

In reality, Barbie opened to a whopping $162 million at home, and Oppenheimer raked in $82 million — astounding for a three-hour-long historical drama. Audiences around the world, evidently, wanted to see these relatively original works, paying $530 million globally to do so. As of July 28, their combined takings have touched $726 million.

There’s a lot to unpack with the Barbenheimer phenomenon, especially in the light of Disney CEO Bob Iger’s saying that the two labor unions on strike in Hollywood need to be “more realistic.” Disney extended his $27-million-per-year contract that same week. However, when Barbie and Oppenheimer released a week later, audiences came out in droves to support good, original films. Funny how that works. 

The movie industry is indeed facing challenges everywhere. As if streaming wasn’t enough, beginning in 2020, the pandemic kept the audiences away from the theaters for the better part of three years. While the issues the dual guild strikes are highlighting deserve a separate essay, negotiators on the studios’ side would do well to heed the message of Barbenheimer.

Oppenheimer, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Cillian Murphy. UK/USA, 181 minutes, IIB. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Both films are based on existing intellectual property: Barbie is a toy that has been around since 1959, and J. Robert Oppenheimer was a real-life physicist whose biography the film is based on. But it’s not the same kind of IP as that all-powerful bugbear that pays Iger’s huge salary, and many of whose new releases have tanked at the box office. Marvel’s 2023 offerings (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) have earned $1.3 billion, and the latest Fast and Furious entry stalled out at $704 million, which isn’t too bad, except those figures are relative. Barbenheimer’s combined budget came in around $200 million below any of those tentpoles.

For all their surface differences, Barbie and Oppenheimer have a great deal in common beyond their ledgers. Barbie sees the game-changing, often problematic, doll coming into the real world to deal with systemic sexism, the failures of second-wave feminism, and her own identity crisis. Oppenheimer tracks the creation of the atomic bomb, and subsequent exaltation and vilification of the flawed man that built it. Both examine the social constructs and ideologies that the main characters are subjected to. Both have lead actors — Margot Robbie and Cillian Murphy — who for all intents and purposes carry their respective films on their shoulders. And above all both epitomize singular visions of filmmakers with a purpose. That’s what audiences are responding to; Barbie and Oppenheimer are the antitheses of Netflix-style algorithmic product creation and Disney’s barrage of vertically integrated IP. Moviegoers are basking in original art, with points of view — one a piece of inclusive, fantastical comedy and the other an epic that’s focused on a moment of world-changing history.

This has happened before: The Matrix, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and, ironically, Star Wars (in 1977) all rode freshness and vision to unexpected box-office glory – the same factors driving Barbenheimer. To paraphrase the old movie saying, “If you build it, they will come.” Gerwig and Nolan built it, and we came. Reports of the death of the movies are greatly exaggerated. It’s just the stale ones that are wilting.