‘Barbenheimer’ Takeaways: If You Build Exciting Movies, They Will Come

When the history of movies in the age of streaming, COVID and the first double strike since 1960 is written, the day of July 21, 2023, will go down as the rare date that’s actually remembered as a box-office landmark. For that was the day that Hollywood dropped two blockbusters — one pink, the other dark — both of which hit their target audiences and went boom.

A downside of our franchise culture is that even when movies become impressive hits, their appeal often boils down to a calculus that’s less inspiring than it is a basic expression of mass taste engineered by market forces. Look, the “Jurassic Park” concept worked again. Shocking! The “Mission: Impossible” series has a wild card tucked into its gamesmanship (you’re not going to get AI to do what Tom Cruise does on a motorcycle), but once you look past the star’s stunt mojo, even the perfectly decent new “M:I” installment has been greeted by critics as “the best action film of the summer.” That made me think: Aren’t the “Mission: Impossible” movies supposed to be more than action films? We’ve got “Fast XXV: Fuel-Injected Diesel” for that.

Which brings me to those pink and dark nuclear weapons. You could say that “Barbie,” by tapping into the appeal of the most famous doll of the 20th century, begins from as iron-clad a piece of IP as any movie ever has. You could say, “Okay, great, it made $155 million in three days — but a Barbie movie was always going to have a built-in audience.” Except, imagine if “Barbie” had been made in a standard way, by a standard filmmaker; it could easily have been a “Smurf” movie with better clothes. “Barbie” may be legendary IP, but the idea of a movie about Barbie, Ken and all their friends is not exactly a concept that lends itself to human dimensions (or to entertaining qualities as a movie for anyone over the age of 12).

For that, you need a filmmaker like Greta Gerwig, who summoned the industry power and the pop vision to transform “Barbie” into an exuberant jokey carnival of fourth-wall-breaking doll’s-house-as-rabbit-hole feminist surrealism — a candy-colored Dreamhouse burlesque that adores Barbie and resents her at the same time, that tweaks the patriarchy even as it treats Ken as the film’s most complicated character, and that has the wit to recognize that Barbie isn’t just a plaything — she’s a metaphysical projection of feminine ideals who also has the effect of undermining who women are.

That’s a lot to unpack in a movie about a doll, but here’s the point: Did Greta Gerwig simply sneak all that stuff into a Mattel movie that can still function perfectly well as a piece of product that’s moving even more product off the shelves? Or did her playful subversive sensibility take a movie that was probably destined to be successful and turn it into something twice as successful? The buzz leading up to the release of “Barbie” was off the hook. I haven’t felt that level of anticipation since the era when the thrill wasn’t yet gone from “Star Wars” movies. And I’d argue that even though most of the people eager to see the film may not have known, going in, who Greta Gerwig was (though they will now), they picked up on what the Greta Gerwig-ness of the whole enterprise meant: that this was not going to be a cookie-cutter Barbie movie, that it was going to be a bowl of very spiked punch. It was going to be a movie that surprised you. It’s that essential quality, and not just the IP, that could make “Barbie” the biggest movie of 2023.

As an act of counterprogramming, the simultaneous release of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” plays like someone’s idea of a cosmic joke. It’s not just that the two films make a perfect pair in their staggering lack of aesthetic and demographic overlap. It’s that glommed together into the greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts entity known as “Barbenheimer,” the two movies seem to express the yin and yang of the 21st-century world. As a culture, we’re as serious as the atom bomb and as superficial as Barbie — and we take our superficial playthings deadly seriously. If the box office triumph of “Barbie” sends a crucial signal that inviting a gifted filmmaker to revel in the power of her idiosyncrasy works as a commercial proposition, the box-office triumph of “Oppenheimer” sends a different signal, reminding us that we still live in a heady and sober culture, one in which a three-hour talkfest meditation on the meaning of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, can seize audiences the way the movies of the ’70s or ’90s used to.

Christopher Nolan is certainly a filmmaker with a built-in fan base. But it’s worth noting what the Nolan brand represents: filmmaking as an adventure into the unknown, as a movie that you go out to a theater to watch, as an experience that’s larger than life, that’s vastly bigger than you. The promise of “Oppenheimer,” and what I think is luring people to theaters to see it in even greater numbers than expected, is that the film won’t just be a biopic about the man who spearheaded the creation of nuclear weapons. It will be a movie about all of us, about what the creation of nuclear weapons did to us. That’s one reason you want to experience “Oppenheimer” with an audience. IMAX, if you see it that way, means a big screen, but the ultimate big screen is the collective consciousness of everyone in the theater.

These two movies, with nothing in common except the power and passion that got each of them made, have arrived at the perfect moment in our perfect storm of entertainment-industry meltdown. Long after their theatrical runs are over, “Barbenheimer” will stand as a touchstone that can remind everyone why we go to the movies: not just to relive some old IP but to dive into a vision, to live life for two hours (or maybe three) in the grip of an artist. There’s a lesson here, apart from buzzy fireworks of success, that the industry needs to remember and embrace. The lesson is that all of this works only when we give artists the license to follow their muse, to express the excitement of what’s in their soul. Everything else is just algorithms.