Barbenheimer: A new era?

As an only child without many cousins around my own age, or many friends until I reached secondary school, I never had much exposure to Barbie. I loved wrestling, so I had wrestling figures, and I loved Batman, so I had Batman toys, and I loved football, so I had multiple footballs and a little goal in the garden. Without anyone who was into Barbie to introduce her to my world, I just lived a childhood without really noticing her very much.

At the grand old age of either 31 or 32, depending on whether it was before or after the 24th of May, that all changed last year. News broke that Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, two filmmakers who I greatly admire, were working on a Barbie film.

Obviously, the thought of a Barbie film brings certain expectations with it that are essentially the opposite of the expectations that the thought of a Gerwig-Baumbach production brings. After an initial WTF, the idea of two highly credible indie filmmakers being given a budget of over $100 million piqued my interest. The fact that it was a Barbie movie, in my mind at least, really just served as a means to an end in putting Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach on a blockbuster marquee. That was enough to start a year-long journey where most conversations about it featured me saying something along the lines of “You know, I actually think it’s gonna be really good.”

Not long after I first heard about the potential of an indy-cult interpretation of Barbie, news dropped about its release date, which happened to be the same day as Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Oppenheimer biopic. The two films couldn’t be better examples of polar opposites for most people, but there was another layer of that for me. Seeing Gerwig and Baumbach attached to a huge budget got me as excited as seeing Nolan attached to yet another one left me cold.

Of course he’s making an Oppenheimer biopic on 70mm film with a huge budget, what else would he be doing next? If anyone was going to use the capabilities of IMAX to set off a nuclear bomb, why wouldn’t it be him? The idea of two indy filmmakers being let loose on a huge IP’s first big-budget studio effort was just far more interesting on a conceptual level.

But back to business as usual for 2022 for the time being. The Batman, Top Gun: Maverick. Thor: Love and Thunder and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness were the big blockbusters of the year. Everything Everywhere All at Once did its thing too, obviously, but in a way that no studio could have planned for. Nope also probably deserves an honourable mention, but Jordan Peele still only seems to sell tickets to Jordan Peele fans. A crowd that I count myself as part of.

The establishment blockbusters all had a whiff of interest about them in different ways. The Batman was a fresh new take on the character, outside of the chains cast by the DC Extended Universe. Top Gun: Maverick was the big revival sequel that we’d all been expecting since the eighties. Thor: Love and Thunder was… A Marvel film. But Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was directed by Sam Raimi as well as being a Marvel film, and that had to be worth something.

Whatever your stance is on how good or bad any of them were, though, they were all sequels and/or adaptations of characters who’d already been adapted multiple times. Everything Everywhere All at Once came along at the right time in that respect, because it seemed like audiences were finally becoming sick of being given the same old safety every summer. No wonder we all lapped it up.

Going into 2023, we haven’t had to look far to find someone panicking about the downfall of cinema. Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny, The Flash and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania have all flopped to different degrees, ranging from completely bombing to considerably underperforming. Even Magic Mike’s Last Dance failed to captivate the girls on tour crowds. The only reason it seems significant though, is because they’re all films that have been safe bets for the last fifteen years. But cinema has existed for longer than just the last fifteen years.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe did something amazing for cinemas from a purely business point of view. It created a surefire string of hits because its episodic nature meant we weren’t allowed to miss any of its instalments, and we were all happy enough to comply with that. The problem is that it bullied original films out of limited screening space and thereby created a culture where audiences were less willing to take a chance on something that they weren’t already familiar with. We got to a point where the only films that stood a chance against the most recent MCU instalment were sequels or reboots of other already successful franchises.

A world post-Thanos has proven to be as difficult for Marvel Studios as it should have been for the residents of the MCU, though. World-ending threat after world-ending threat against the backdrop of a neverending multiverse has just been tiring. Keeping up doesn’t seem feasible anymore, so we’re no longer obliged to. Similarly, after years and years of sequels that only exist to remind us of what we liked previously, we’re just about ready to start again rather than keep up.

The idea of Barbie and Oppenheimer both making their big-budget debuts on the same day, both being the products of credible auteurs, was just what we needed. But more than that, they were just what each other needed.

The first time I saw the two colliding was a post that I can’t exactly remember in a Facebook group - Martin Scorsese Eyebrowposting. It’s little more than a shitposting group for cinephiles. The post was probably something along the lines of a cast photo from Goodfellas captioned “Me and the boys going to see Barbie on opening day.”

The idea that people like us, snobbery intended, would be interested in a Barbie film was a joke, but it was a joke rooted in truth. Before long, it created two warring factions within the cinephile community - those who got why it might actually be decent, and those who saw the Barbie logo and little else past it. Add the juxtaposition of Oppenheimer’s status as the cinephile standard of the summer as well as Barbie’s de facto rival, and there becomes something worth talking about.

Personally, as one might guess from the tone in which I write about Nolan and Oppenheimer, I’m not one to get all that excited by his name alone. Batman Begins came out when I was 15, and The Dark Knight when I was 18. For a lot of people in my generation, they acted as awakening experiences. These were superhero films that lulled us into the cinema under the pretence of a format that we were used to, just to give us something more akin to the work of Michael Mann and Oliver Stone. As such, a lot of kids my age who didn’t have much exposure to cinema outside of superhero films got a sense of just how cool films could be. I was/am more into the campy stylings of the Tim Burton Batman films, though.

Mildly interested but apathetic quickly turns into “Fuck Oppenheimer” when it’s on the other team. As I’m sure the same effect exists for those who could have happily ignored the existence of Barbie. As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats, though, and now we’ve got two summer blockbusters. For the first time in about fifteen years, neither of them are Marvel films.

None of this would have been possible without the people involved in Barbie, though. Christopher Nolan films will always create a buzz, and he’s earned the privilege of a captive audience over a number of years. Barbie usually would have been confined to its own captive audience, but Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach gave it an appeal outside of that. Without the intrigue that comes with the idea of two credible, well-respected names making a Barbie movie, the Barbenheimer event splits down the middle.

That’s perhaps the biggest morsel of hope in all of this. The difference has been made by something that means something. It isn’t a random brand, an episode of continuity or a nostalgia hit. It’s that the people who have made these films are becoming a draw in themselves once again.