Greta Gerwig makes history as Barbie has biggest opening weekend for film directed by a woman

Barbie made $377m while Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer took home $174m, making ‘Barbenheimer’ biggest box office weekend of 2023 so far

Greta Gerwig has made history as Barbie scored a US$377m (￡293m, A$560m) opening weekend around the world, making it the biggest debut ever for a film directed by a woman.

At the North American box office – combining the US and Canada – Barbie claimed top spot with a massive $155m in ticket sales from 4,243 locations, surpassing The Super Mario Bros Movie and every Marvel film released this year to become the biggest opening of the year.

The social media-fuelled fusion of Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer as “Barbenheimer” brought moviegoers back to the theatres in record numbers to see both films as a double feature. Oppenheimer also soared past expectations, taking in $80.5m from 3,610 theatres in the US and Canada, making it Nolan’s biggest non-Batman debut and one of the best ever starts for an R-rated biographical drama.

It’s also the first time that one movie opened to more than $100m and another movie opened to more than $80m in the same weekend. When all is settled on Monday US time, it will probably turn out to be the fourth-biggest box office weekend of all time with more than $300m industrywide.

Internationally, Barbie earned $182m from 69 territories, fuelling a $337m global weekend, while Oppenheimer did $93.7m from 78 territories, even managing to surpass Barbie in India, for a $174.2m global total. In the UK, cinema chain Vue said a fifth of customers saw both films in a double bill on the weekend, which was the biggest for UK cinema ticket sales since Covid.

Barbenheimer affected ticket sales for Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I, which fell 64% after a healthy opening weekend and strong reviews. Having lost Imax screens to Oppenheimer, the Tom Cruise vehicle added $19.5m to North American box office takings, which reached $118.8m.

Women drove the historic Barbie opening, making up 65% of the audience, according to PostTrak, and 40% of ticket buyers were under the age of 25. By comparison, Oppenheimer audiences were 62% male and 63% were over the age of 25, with a somewhat surprising 32% that were between the ages of 18 and 24.

This is the comeback weekend Hollywood has been dreaming of since the pandemic. There have been big openings and successes – Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water among them – but the fact that two movies are succeeding at the same time is notable.

“It was a truly historic weekend and continues the positive box office momentum of 2023,” said Michael O’Leary, president and CEO of the National Association of Theatre Owners. “People recognised that something special was happening and they wanted to be a part of it.”

And yet in the background looms disaster as Hollywood studios continue to squabble with striking actors and writers over a fair contract.

Barbie and Oppenheimer were the last films on the 2023 calendar to get a massive, global press tour. Both went right up to the 11th hour, squeezing in every last moment with their movie stars. Oppenheimer even pushed its London premiere forward by an hour, knowing that Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Cillian Murphy would have to leave to symbolically join the picket lines by the time the movie began.