Movie posters for Barbie and Oppenheimer are pictured outside of the Cinemark Somerdale 16 and XD in Somerdale, Recent Jersey, 2023.
Hannah Beier | The Washington Post | Getty Images
“Barbenheimer” stays red-hot on the box office.
The combined force of Warner Bros.’ “Barbie” and Universal’s “Oppenheimer” has led to greater than $1.1 billion in global ticket sales since July 21.
related investing news
Domestically, “Barbenheimer” saw smaller-than-average second week ticket sales drops as tens of millions of moviegoers headed to cinemas to catch the favored flicks. The truth is, each movies’ ticket sales fell just 43% from their opening weekends.
Typically, blockbuster features will see ticket sales fall between 50% and 70% after the debut weekend. Second week numbers are sometimes checked out by box office analysts as an indicator of whether a movie may have longevity on the box office or will fizzle quickly. The smaller the drop, the higher.
“‘Barbenheimer’ will go down as some of the notable and unforeseeable milestones in the history of cinema not only for what it means to the bottom-line box office dollars for the industry but in addition as a cultural event centered around moviegoing,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.
Over the weekend, “Barbie” added $93 million, bringing its domestic haul to $351 million. The Greta Gerwig and Mattel collaboration for Warner Bros. is nearing $800 million worldwide and will turn out to be the second billion-dollar film of 2023.
Universal‘s “Oppenheimer,” meanwhile, tallied one other $46.7 million over the weekend. Its domestic gross now stands at $175 million. Globally, it’s generated $405 million.
“For a domestic summer marketplace desperately in need of a box office boost, the July 21 simultaneous theatrical debuts of ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ set off a sequence response of overall box office that has infused the all-important season with nearly three quarters of a billion dollars of bonus money,” Dergarabedian said.
Heading into “Barbenheimer’s” first weekend, the summer box office, which runs from the primary weekend in May through Labor Day, was down around 7% in comparison with 2022. Two weeks later, it’s up 9%, based on data from Comscore.
Similarly, the confluence of those two movies boosted the general domestic box office compared with last 12 months’s haul up to now. Prior to “Barbenheimer,” ticket sales were up 12%. Two weeks later, they were up 20%.
The general domestic box office still lags behind prepandemic levels by around 16%, nonetheless. And prospects for catching up are dwindling as studios have began to move big releases to next 12 months as Hollywood digs in for drawn-out writers’ and actors’ strikes.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal is the distributor of “Oppenheimer.”