Margot Robbie refused to budge Barbie for Oppenheimer: “If you’re scared to be up against us, then you move”
Barbenheimer was born because Barbie producer Margot Robbie staked a claim on Christopher Nolan's favorite date, July 21
Aux News Barbie
At this stage of cinema history, there’s a general air of goodwill, of rising tides lifting all boats. If a big movie succeeds, it helps preserve theater-going culture for all. But that doesn’t mean there’s zero competitiveness (or pettiness) behind the scenes in Hollywood. Christopher Nolan “has this superstition around that date, the 21st,” Cillian Murphy says in Variety’s Actors on Actors interview with Margot Robbie. So it was perhaps a little suspicious that his old studio, Warner Bros., scheduled its own tentpole film Barbie against Nolan’s Oppenheimer on July 21.
In fact, “One of your producers, Chuck Roven, called me, because we worked together on some other projects,” Robbie recalls in the conversation with Murphy. (Margot was a producer as well as the star of Barbie.) “And he was like, ‘I think you guys should move your date.’ And I was like, ‘We’re not moving our date. If you’re scared to be up against us, then you move your date.’ And he’s like, ‘We’re not moving our date. I just think it’d be better for you to move.’ And I was like, “We’re not moving!’”
That’s quite a gauntlet to throw down, and one might expect there to be some tension between the two productions after such a conversation. But “I think this is a really great pairing, actually. It’s a perfect double billing, Oppenheimer and Barbie,” says Robbie, understating the situation just a bit. “Clearly the world agreed. Thank God. The fact that people were going and being like, “Oh, watch Oppenheimer first, then Barbie.” I was like, ‘See? People like everything.’ People are weird.”
Murphy isn’t super up on meme culture (“I have two teenage boys. I do know what a meme is”), but “it was impossible to avoid” the Barbenheimer fanart. The phenomenon was so widespread that “People kept asking me, ‘So is each marketing department talking to each other?’” Robbie recalls. “And I was like, ‘No, this is the world doing this! This is not a part of the marketing campaign.’”
“And I think it happened because both movies were good,” Murphy adds. “In fact, that summer, there was a huge diversity of stuff in the cinema, and I think it just connected in a way that you or I or the studios or anybody could never have predicted.”
“You can’t force that or orchestrate that,” Robbie says.
Murphy agrees: “No, and it may never happen again.”
72 Comments
It’s a weird thing about Hollywood. They aren’t mutually exclusive, and don’t have to compete. They aren’t concerts. Just because I watch one movie doesn’t mean I can’t watch the other.
Right? This is nuts. Though I guess it is a bit different these days when movies are actually pretty expensive and everyone’s wallets are already stretched tight, maybe they can only afford one movie a week or so. They care more about the splash of who had the biggest “opening weekend,” and people are usually going to only one movie per weekend, so they wanted her to move to another weekend.
But they do kinda compete for opening weekend box office numbers. I think there are a number of people who only have time or the motivation to watch one big opening a weekend, especially if one of them is a three-hour movie like Oppenheimer. While many movies can be buoyed by great reviews and by gradual word of mouth, there’s a lot of influence from topping the week’s chart and breaking box-office records on opening weekend.
Sorry, ElectricSheep. You’ve already made the exact same point.
It’s fine. My thoughts are rarely unique. lol
True, but in this particular case I think they drove each others’ numbers up. I know plenty of people who did the Barbenheimer thing who would probably have only seen one or the other if they were released different weekends. It’s key that they are such completely and utterly different movies.
It was a one-way street. Barbenheimer was primarily Barbie fans who also were interested in Oppenheimer. The most diehard of Nolan-stans had no interest in Barbie and were absolutely dicks about the whole thing.See also Eras/Killers of the Flower Moon.
Yeah, I get it, but it’s self inflicted. They’re valuing $20 made on opening night more than $20 made on the Tuesday after, and not many business do that, just movies, music, video games, and a few others. My company is happy to make a sale at product launch or a week later.
Agreed that it’s in a way self-inflicted, but I don’t know if they’re necessarily valuing the opening-night $20 more. Maybe it’s more that Hollywood is paying attention to the costs of screening a movie instead of just the revenues. A theater collecting $2M in receipts over 3 days would be accompanied by 3 days’ cost of screening that movie. Alternatively, you could collect $2M in receipts over three weeks, and that would be accompanied by 21 days of screening costs. So, net net Hollywood would prefer sales concentrated early in the run because that means fewer empty seats not generating revenue but still costing money.
For studios, the money isn’t the same. They get a higher percentage of the $20 ticket in the first week than they do in the second or third.
Oh yeah? New information to me. That’s weird, why is that?
Mostly because they have the power to demand it. This is also the reason you hear theaters saying they make most of their profits on concessions- because they do.
Isn’t the reason they care more about the weekend $20 that a strong opening (usually) makes it way more likely they’ll also get the Tuesday $20? What they really want is $40.
Right? Under normal circumstances we wouldn’t even consider them competing for the same audience. This isn’t like if you opened a Pixar film against Dreamworks. They’re more or less no competitors.
“Just because I watch one movie doesn’t mean I can’t watch the other.”
No, it doesn’t mean you “can’t”, but how many people do you know that see multiple movies in the theatre in a weekend?
Opening weekend is when studios get the biggest chunk of the revenue they split with theaters. That’s why they’re so eager to get you to the theatre on opening weekend, and don’t want any competition – they know it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to see TWO movies in one weekend.Not to mention other little promotional things that can be affected by your release date. Is your star hosting SNL this weekend? Or theirs. Who’s on Smartless this week? Etc.
I like Margot better as an actress, less so as an Oscar campaign manager.
I think Murphy’s right that Barbenheimer will never happen again, but you can bet your sweet tush that Hollywood is gonna try their darndest to make it happen every time a pair of stylistically differing movies come out near one another.
It’s going to be fun watching studios attempt to make this happen, especially when one movie is clearly superior to the other.
“It’s going to be fun watching studios attempt to make this happen”
You know that this has been happening literally since the dawn of movies, right?
Someone is gonna manage to get a second cinematic universe off the ground eventually!
They already tried in September with Saw Patrol (Saw X & Paw Patrol). It didn’t work but they’ll keep trying, I’m sure.
They tried it with Saw/Paw Patrol and it failed. It hasn’t been attempted since.
That is comically grim holy shit
I will never bet my sweet tush
Also more movies based on girls toys. I’m dreading what they would do to My Little Pony in live action. And I thought the current generation looked horrific.
I love that there are people who think that Barbie and Oppenheimer is the first time anyone has ever employed counterprogramming.
And that somehow people doing it just people trying to copy Barbenheimer.
In terms of tonal shift, I don’t think anything will ever top the fact that Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro were originally released as a double feature in Japan.
Stunning and brave.
Glad she told Roven to pound sand…both films could inhabit the same space on the same date and be successful, as was proven.
Yep, took my dad to see Oppenheimer and took my nieces to see Barbie. It was a great pairing.
Nah, Barbie first then Oppenheimer.
I watched two minutes of Barbie, followed by three minutes of Oppenheimer, followed by two minutes of Barbie, and so forth, as the filmmakers clearly intended.
Barboppenheimie, a five hour epic about how the atomic age was born, then spawned an iconic doll.
So you were the breathless person who kept opening the door.
lol
I did Croppenheimer, which was NOT, as the AV Club mistakenly stated, about controversy surround the image ratio of the film.It was a Ben Cropp doco followed by Oppenheimer:
So two people who likely had no say on the release date had a brief conversation about it?
Since Robbie was producing, I’d wager she had some say.
I would think the distributor / studio makes the call on when to release a film, not the producers.
She was a producer, the star, and had agreed to take a cut of the profits rather than a one-time payment. She absolutely had a say and a TON of stake in its success.
It’s beautiful that you think that, but producers OF COURSE have a say.
Apparently Nolan likes to do that one date and he’s not the studio or the distributor.
If you watched the interview, she says she was directly contacted in her role as producer of Barbie by the producer of Oppenheimer because they knew each other to talk about the release schedule.So yeah, she had a say.
I did watch the interview and as with all of these actors on actors segments, it’s two actors riffing off of each other and trying to tell fun stories. Robbie says she was talking to a producer who she has worked with on other stuff and they had that conversation and I believe that. And maybe she did have some ability to voice input on release date. But I hear her story and it sounds like more light bantering she did with a friend than anything else.
The distributor works with the marketing department and is solely responsible for the release date. The producers don’t have any official say.
I imagine both Nolan and Robbie have the clout and cache, even before the success of their last films, to pick their release dates regardless of what the studio or marketing departments think.
agree to disagree.
“agree to disagree.”
Cool. You’re incorrect.
Nolan perhaps have enough clout (considering he moved from Warner and most other studios probably wanted him, so he could get any contract he wanted), but I don’t think Robbie has the same sway
“The producers don’t have any official say.”
Of fucking course they do.
Seems to me there’s a big difference between having “no official say” and being someone the studios would really like to keep happy.
Yep. Right up until they think it’ll affect their pocketbook maybe.
You think it’s producers who decide to dump the movie they worked on for three years in mid-february?Barbie has fifteen individuals with a producing credit, so they must’ve all really loved that date.
I mean there’s producers, and there’s producers. Robbie IS that movie. Moreover, she’s any potential sequels as well. She obviously has clout here.
As successful as both movies were, they probably would have earned even more if Barbie budged.
Nahhh. People who would ordinarily have seen neither, saw both because of the Barbenheimer thing. Barbie might’ve still been OK but Oppenheimer made more than Nolan’s last 2 movies combined, and with an (arguably) way less audience-friendly premise.
And now we understand that Margot Robbie has some muscle in Hollyweird circles.At the moment, I’m very ok with that.
Wokey brokey—oh wait
You must be thinking of yourself. Or your ignorant family maybe?
“Move your release date.”“No, you move your release date.”“I’ll move my release date if you move yours.”“Then I guess neither of us are moving our release date because I’m not moving mine.”And so on.
It’s worth noting that wide-scale national release dates and the obsession with opening weekend box office tallies only dates back to the mid/late seventies. Prior to that movies had staggered releases. They’d open in the larger markets, sometimes on a roadshow platform for premium ticket prices, then roll out across the rest of the country. It wasn’t uncommon for a movie to take a year or even longer to hit much of America and often a film wouldn’t make a profit (or turn out to flop) until it hit the medium-sized and smaller cities. It was also common practice for distributors to rent movies that were years, even decades, old to small town theaters where there was often a surprising appetite for them. It was actually a great system for the studios and movie-going public. The studios had multiple income streams over a long period of time and, if you lived in a city of a 100,000 or more you had six or more theaters offering a wider variety of offerings including films a year or more older that you ever got around to catching but could still see if you only heard good things about down the road.
I don’t think the release date is Margot Robbie’s decision to make. Pretty sure the heads at Warner Brothers are the ones to make that decision. Nice puff piece though.
Barbenheimer was born because Barbie producer Margot Robbie staked a claim on Christopher Nolan’s favorite date, July 21And here I thought it was because two competing studios were scared shitless of not having a great first weekend so they partnered their publicists to feed a nonsensical buzzword to create an event out of nothing that could then be cynically regurgitated by dying media outlets like The AV Club.
You say that as if it didn’t totally work, and result in $2.5bn.
It seems more likely that WB scheduled their big movie for that date as a “fuck you” to Nolan for leaving them for another studio.But whatever the reasoning was it was a fun thing for a few weeks that I can’t wait to see how studios try and fail to replicate in the future.
Know your worth and don’t budge on principle. Good advice.
LOL Robbie had zero say in when the film was released. It’s the Distributor that decides that. But this makes for a cute story.
Why should anybody who didn’t produce, direct, write, or star in the movies give a shit?? It has zero bearing on whether an audience member is going to watch or appreciate a film (And now someone will very cleverly say, “And yet you commented,” as if pointing out that something is pointless is the same thing as being concerned with it.)
You seem pretty upset for someone who shouldn’t care.
Oppenheimer’s box office would have been lower without Barbenheimer.
Exactly. Great movie and all, but its not something that would have drawn massive crowds by itself.