With ‘Barbenheimer,’ Hollywood proved that it could finally pull America’s attention away from the politics tab.
Hollywood proved that it could finally pull America’s attention away from the politics tab.
A merica returned to the movies this weekend. With the opening of Barbie ($155 million) and Oppenheimer ($80.5 million), Hollywood posted its fourth-best-ever weekend box office. Tom Cruise’s latest Mission: Impossible installment, despite being bumped off premium screens by Oppenheimer, is still putting up decent numbers and is now in a supporting role for what’s turning into a comeback year for the silver screen.
Literal and figurative blows against Silicon Valley’s attempted takeover of Tinseltown abounded. Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan had left Warner Bros. over its decision to put its 2021 movie slate directly onto HBO Max’s streaming service. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, is in many ways an unsubtle commentary on the industry’s need to save storytelling from the subversion of a digital foe.
Could this surge of interest in the movies mean something? Not only for Hollywood’s business model but for the culture at large?
This was a weekend quite unlike the three highest-grossing weekends in film history, which all happened in the years before the pandemic and were each driven by major installments in existing franchises: Avengers: Endgame, Avengers: Infinity War, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Barbie spins a movie out of one of the most recognizable cultural artifacts in the world. Yet the project was headed by two filmmakers from the indie world, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, who are also wife and husband. Each is notable for the coming-of-age stories they’ve written and/or directed: Lady Bird, written and directed by Gerwig; Frances Ha, directed by Baumbach and written by Gerwig (who also starred); and Kicking and Screaming and The Squid and the Whale, written and directed by Baumbach. Yet the film managed to become a mass-culture event, inspiring groups of filmgoers to dress up for their screening and make the movie an occasion.
On the strength of early reviews, director Christopher Nolan’s reputation, and the general “Barbenheimer hype,” Oppenheimer blew away official predictions of a $50 million opening despite being a heavy, three-hour historical film with little action and having a lesser-known (though beloved by many) actor in the lead role.
I would like to cautiously venture a theory: For one weekend at least, we had mass culture bidding to take back the American zeitgeist that has been owned by politics since 2015, and arguably longer than that. All news networks are seeing cratering ratings, even with the return of Donald Trump the candidate and the threat of his return to the White House. Political news sites are in summer slumps like they haven’t seen in years. In casual conversation, I feel an exhaustion, as though the Trump and Covid years were this awful era of binge-drinking political hooch. And now there’s a collective desire to put those wastrel years behind us, if just for a few midsummer days.
Barbie and Oppenheimer are both films with politics running through them. The first has almost a dozen references to the “patriarchy” and the latter climaxes with . . . congressional hearings about a security clearance. But the message of the first seems to argue that wokeness and anti-wokeness get in the way of joy in real life. The latter seems to offer that politics looks trivial next to the great accomplishments and terrors that stalk our times.
Some cinéastes are hoping that the contrast of this weekend with this year’s major-franchise flops, like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny or The Flash, will cause Hollywood to rethink its reliance on existing intellectual property and endless sequels. I’m not sure that’s the lesson.
Ben Affleck and Alex Convery had critical and modest commercial success with Air, the story of the creation of the Air Jordan basketball shoe and product line. The movie, which reunited Affleck and Matt Damon, felt like a ’90s Miramax film but written within the commercial constraints of the “airport book” age. It doesn’t quite signal a forthcoming mid-budget revival, but it was a success. It’s a shame, in a way, that the far more ambitious and satisfying The Last Duel, written by Damon, Affleck, and Nicole Holofcener and directed by Ridley Scott, failed to earn out in the Covid era of theater business.
The top three movies by box office in 2023 so far are The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. They are followed by The Little Mermaid, Avatar: The Way of Water, and the critically panned Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This is an industry still riding sequels to existing franchises, such as John Wick 4 and late-20th-century “nerd IP”–like comic books and Nintendo games.
But Hollywood has now proved to itself that a big-name director with a great story and cast can still outearn a budget that isn’t bloated by CGI studios. And it proved that it could finally pull America’s attention away from the politics tab. Perhaps it’s a sign that Hollywood and Washington can both find a path back to sanity. We can dream.