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‘Barbenheimer‘ was completely unexpected, but the studio behind Barbie gladly leaned in, said Dana Nussbaum, EVP of worldwide marketing for Warner Bros. Pictures, calling the unusual double-feature frenzy one of a few unforseen and welcome twists while rolling out the Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster.
“That was absolutely a surprise to us. But one that we found incredibly delightful,” she said during a Q&A at New York Advertising Week.
The Margot Robbie-starring romp and Oppenheimer, Universal’s biopic about Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, couldn’t be more different,” she said. “That was a great example of a surprise. I would love to take credit for that, by the way, but [it was] absolutely, not at all architected by us. It’s something that happened very organically, but something that we leaned into.”
“When we saw that this was out there, and that there was conversation popping up around it, we made sure that Greta and Margo…went to see Oppenheimer. They took a photo and it sort of kicked off this entire spirit, which was so incredible, because at the outset, people wanted to pit the two films against each other.”
Barbie has grossed more than $1.4 billion worldwide ($635 million domestic). It premiered July 21 alongside Christopher Nolan’s film, has seen an international box office of $942 million ($323 million domestic).
“What we realized is there’s room for both and like, what an amazing celebration of culture and moviegoing to have room for both and to sort of do that double feature altogether,” said Nussbaum.
The film blanketed the world in pink and flooded social media in a masterful marketing campaign that also followed fans wherever they gathered, around a Barbie shoe challenge by Chrissy Teigen, to Ryan Gosling’s balland ‘I’m Just Ken’ — most recently parodied by Pete Davidson on SNL last weekend.
Barbie is now the highest grossing film in Warner Bros.’ 100-year history, the highest grossing film ever from a female filmmaker at the domestic box office, and the largest worldwide film release of 2023. It takes Mattel’s iconic doll on a journey of female empowerment that’s integral to the story but, Nussbaum said, not something the studio forced.
“It was not lost on any of us that this was a really great responsibility, but also a tremendous opportunity. But we were very careful to making sure that we were into the spirit of personalizing this campaign that we were letting audiences decide how they engage with it. We never built it as a feminist story, we never came out and said any of that, because we wanted everybody to have their own experience in the same way that we were all sort of delightfully surprised with the film, when we first saw it, we wanted that discovery and that surprise to be preserved for audiences and for audiences to be able to decide what they were responding to, and what was really meaningful to them.”
When WB execs “first read the script, it was really clear that Greta had really given us an absolute gift of this film,” she said, “and that there was something in it that, if we did it right, we really had the opportunity not only to create a cultural moment, but to change things in a meaningful way. To really just change what it looks like to be a tentpole film, and how you know, female led films come into the space, and who they’re for, and how they perform at the box office.”