Barbenheimer and Oppenbarbie are the trending words this monsoon, a union of two disparate films—Barbie and Oppenheimer—that are set to storm the box office on 21 July. It’s a rare clash of the titans between the eternally pink world of Barbie and the biopic of theoretical physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. And this tussle has taken social media by storm.
Perhaps without irony, people have fused the two releases—an antithetical union between Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie—and memes have become the flavour of the season. However, what really warrants an analysis is the marketing strategy behind this booming trend, which will seal the deal for the highly-anticipated mega-releases this week.
Finding common ground
Set in an extravagant utopian world, Gerwig’s two-hour-long Barbie will explore the existential crises of Mattel-inspired fashion dolls. Nolan’s Oppenheimer, on the other hand, is a three-hour biopic based on American Prometheus, a 2005 biography of the physicist.
These big-budget films, starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Cillian Murphy and other Hollywood bigwigs, contrast each other on every front – from theme and storyline to cinematography, costumes, and screenplay. But movie promotions and marketing commitments have led them to find common ground – a very, very interesting one at that.
Robbie, who plays the titular Barbie in Gerwig’s film, posted a photo of the two posing with Oppenheimer tickets last week.
Murphy, who plays Oppenheimer in Nolan’s film, expressed his admiration for Robbie and Gosling (who is the leading Ken in Barbie). In an interview with La Vanguardia, he urged fans to watch both films on the same day. Actors and filmmakers of both movies, therefore, are quite committed to the popular double feature idea.
Memes and videos on platforms like TikTok and Twitter have received massive engagement, with many releasing fan-made trailers of Barbenheimer. The trend further picked up when several home-grown brands began selling their own Barbenheimer merchandise.
I humbly present my Barbie-Oppenheimer 2024 electoral map pic.twitter.com/ULp2WFenQL
— Emmet Sandberg (@SandbergEmmet) June 28, 2023
It doesn’t get better than this one 🔥
Designed by Sean Longmore for @layered_butter ✨ pic.twitter.com/5E2q7V9LjY
— The Cinegogue (@TheCinegogue) July 7, 2023
Counterprogramming for attracting audiences
Studios usually avoid releasing more than one big film a week, especially in summer. The reason? “No matter how good a movie you’ve got, if it opens against five or six others, you’re not going to get traction,” Bob Berney, CEO of Picturehouse, told Variety in 2004. But movie critics say that an ‘antiquated strategy of counterprogramming’ is at play in the case of Barbie and Oppenheimer. It is the act of simultaneously releasing thematically divergent films to target diverse and untapped audience groups.
Days after Barbie’s teaser reveal in December 2022, Universal Pictures released Oppenheimer’s main trailer.
A similar instance of counterprogramming can be traced to 2008 when Michael Patrick King’s Sex and the City – a romantic-comedy film with Sarah Jessica Parker in the lead –was released alongside Phyllida Lloyd’s Mamma Mia!, starring Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan.
“Every time ‘Barbie’ released a trailer, ‘Oppenheimer’ would start trending…They’re so vastly different that they allow for the narrative that popped up organically. This kind of organic marketing is probably good for both films,” Robert Mitchell, director of theatrical insights at UK-based film predictive analysis firm Gower Street, told The New York Times.
Simultaneous releases can allow films to tap into non-targeted audiences and gain traction from each other’s distinct fan base.
Social media buzz also helped Barbie and Oppenheimer. Memes and articles created a digital bubble for the films, and word-of-mouth converted the virtual hype into a more physical one.
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‘Making the Barbie cool, encore’
The target audience for Barbie is not girls and their bored parents—it is the ‘boomers’, ‘millennials’, and ‘GenZs’ who grew up with the classic Mattel doll.
The film, which also boasts of an ethnically diverse cast, rides on the childhood nostalgia of 18-35-year-olds and reiterates that “Barbie is for everyone”.
Its ultimate aim is to infiltrate every corner of popular culture. And it has been quite successful too. Barbie has made heavy use of user-generated content to manufacture a successful ‘pink wave’ that has taken over all forms of social media.
Even Googling ‘Barbie’, ‘Ryan Gosling’, or ‘Margot Robbie’ can reveal some (read: pink) easter eggs.
The team released character posters of the entire cast in 2022 with a sparkly starburst centre and a sky-blue backdrop. Realising the possibility of it becoming a trend early on, Warner Bros. Pictures created an AI-based Barbie selfie generator that gained massive popularity across age groups.
Original Barbie maker Mattel has also cashed in on this wave. According to a report by The Guardian, the American toy manufacturer has signed collaboration deals with 100+ brands across the apparel, FnB and makeup spectrum, with companies such as GAP, Pinkberry Yoghurt, and NYX Cosmetics. There’s also a Barbie Xbox and a Dreamhouse-lookalike rentable Airbnb in Malibu, California.
Grammy-winning singers Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa have released Barbie originals, What Was I Made For and Dance the Night, while rappers Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj have refurbished Aqua’s famous 1997 single, I Am a Barbie Girl, for the movie.
“They’ve taken that DNA of what made this toy so successful and put that into the marketing [by] having her turn up in gaming, in Architectural Digest, in food, fashion, interior design, everything,” Alex Wilson, executive director of international creative agency Amplify, told Telegraph.
Wilson considers this proof of an industry transitioning from “product placement to product protagonist”, where a movie franchise will be built on “product or intellectual property” and not vice versa, letting the moviemakers avail a readymade fan base.
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Oppenheimer’s copy-pasted marketing
Unlike Barbie’s high-ended marketing spree, Oppenheimer let its rivals do the hard work. Popular for mysterious marketing, Nolan learnt from the Tenet (2020) blunder and did away with his imprecise promotional strategies. The consecutive London premiere and media appearances of lead actors suggest Oppenheimer’s campaign has a parasitic relationship with Barbie’s.
Analogies by Nolan and Murphy fans have also fuelled the campaign. The 30 June fire near WB Studios, for one, was considered an Oppenheimer PR stunt. The meme also became extremely popular because of the bitter split between WB Studios and Nolan.
Initially silent, Nolan has now realised the potential of the Barbenheimer wave and embraced the trend.
“I think for those of us who care about movies, we’ve been really waiting to have a crowded marketplace again, and now it’s here, and that’s terrific,” Variety reported Nolan as saying.
The final box office tally will reveal who the winner is—whether audiences wish to be reminded of America’s role in ushering in a nuclear era, or how its toy behemoth Mattel sold a dream to the world.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)