No one is immune to the cultural craze that is “Barbenheimer” — including Quentin Tarantino.
Moviegoers across the globe assembled over the weekend to celebrate the debut of both Greta Gerwig’s pink and plastic-permeated “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s atomic history piece “Oppenheimer.” With both films opening on the same day, many ticket buyers picked up same-day viewings of the films — Tarantino among them.
In a photograph posted to Twitter, a user snapped a picture of the filmmaker in Los Angeles with Roger Avary, his “Pulp Fiction” co-writer and co-host on the pair’s Video Archives Podcast. The caption shared that Tarantino walked across the street after seeing “Oppenheimer” to buy tickets for “Barbie,” going from the Westwood Village to the Regency Bruin Theatre.
Funnily enough, the Bruin was featured in Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” in a sequence where Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie) buys a ticket to sit among strangers and watch a comedy that she’s starring in. Tarantino’s moviegoing experience replicates the pattern, as “Barbie” stars Robbie as the marquee doll.
The official social media presence of the Video Archives podcast affirmed the description: “Yes our boys were out last night doing what they love to do the most together, seeing movies.”
Although Tarantino has no official social media presence, Avary was happy to sing praises for their “Barbie”-going experience on Twitter: “The Barbie showing in Westwood last night had such an amazing audience, literally cheering the movie. Many of them were larping. I haven’t seen that in a while, and it was awesome.”
The phenomenon deemed “Barbeheimer” stirred up a box office craze, with both films fueling the fourth-biggest overall weekend in history.
“This is an unequivocally great weekend for moviegoing,” says David A. Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research. “‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ are complementing each other at the box office, not taking audience from each other.”
Gerwig’s comedy based on the iconic plastic Mattel doll earned this year’s biggest debut with a whopping $155 million, earning a global total of $337 million. “Barbie,” too, made history as the largest opening weekend for a female director ever. Nolan’s character study of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, too, beat expectations opening with $80.5 million, with a global total of $174 million.
