Weekend projections: Barbie and Oppenheimer deliver biggest weekend since Endgame

July 23, 2023

Barbie

Barbie and Oppenheimer are combining to deliver only the fourth weekend in box office history that will top $300 million for all movies combined, and could be the second-biggest weekend at the domestic box office, behind the weekend Avengers: Endgame opened, when all the numbers are in. Both movies are exceeding expectations, but Barbie is the blockbuster that’s set to have the biggest weekend of 2023.

Here’s how the domestic numbers look as of Sunday morning (click on the image for the full chart of films reporting so far)…



Our model predicted $131 million for Barbie on Friday morning, based on the fundamentals of the film, audience buzz, and Thursday previews. Based on the previews alone, the film was on course to make $159 million, so there’s an argument that it has fallen back to earth a tiny bit. However you cut it though, this is a monster debut and a triumph for Warner Bros., Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig. It’s hard to find a parallel in movie history other than The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which powered to a $146-million opening in April and The Hunger Games, which opened with $152.5 million back in 2012. Other than those three films, every film that we don’t consider to be a sequel and earned over $130 million on opening weekend was either a remake or a new storyline in a well-established franchise.

Barbie and Mario are now set to be the top two films of the year, which says something about moviegoers’ desire to see something new in theaters.

Meanwhile, Oppenheimer will deliver Christoper Nolan his best opening outside the Dark Knight franchise, with its $80.5 million right in line with what our model predicted on Friday. It was definitely helped by the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and by playing in a lot of IMAX and other PLF theaters. How much that contributed to the $80 million is hard to say, and that might have some implications for its legs. Right now, Universal has good reason to thank Warner Bros., which is somewhat ironic given that Warner Bros. possibly scheduled Barbie against Oppenheimer as payback for Nolan moving to Universal.

The sea of red ink in the right-hand column of the chart above tells us that the competition from the Oppen-barbie juggernaut pulled down the performance of all the returning films this weekend. The extent to which they missed our model’s predictions is a measure of how their audiences overlapped with Barbie and Oppenheimer. The worst hit films were Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Mission: Impossible, the latter of which lost a lot of IMAX and PLF screens to Oppenheimer of course. The films least affected were Sound of Freedom and Elemental.

Sound of Freedom has now accumulated $124.7 million at the domestic box office, ahead of Mission: Impossible, and way ahead of expectations. Elemental’s long legs are a case of too little too late for Disney, but both films are contributing useful extra dollars to theaters, given the disappointing performances of the major franchise movies that were expected to dominate the Summer.

With a string of mid-tier titles coming out over the next month or two, we could be living in a Barbie world for a while.

- Studio weekend projections
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

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Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Greta Gerwig, Christopher Nolan, Margot Robbie