Warner Bros and Universal Pictures have announced the box office preview earnings for Barbie and Oppenheimer, respectively, and there’s a clear winner.
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Ahead of the films’ simultaneous releases on Friday (21 July), analysts predicted that Barbie could earn upwards of $100m (£77.8m) at the US box office during opening weekend, while Oppenheimer was pegged at around $50m (£38.9m).
The preview earnings, released Friday, appear to support these predictions as Barbie earned $22.3m (£17.3m) in the US across 3,900 cinemas.
Meanwhile, Universal says Oppenheimer collected $10.5m (£8.2m); though, it was previewed in fewer theatres than Barbie (3,150).
By comparison, Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s last movie to open outside the Covid pandemic, earned $5.5m (£4m) in box office previews in 2017.
Barbie’s early box office return tops any other release this year, signalling a windfall for Warner Bros, director Greta Gerwig and its star Margot Robbie who also serves as executive producer.
Margot Robbie in ‘Barbie’— (© 2022 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)
Both films have received rave reviews; though, Nolan’s picture has pipped Gerwig’s to the post on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.
Oppenheimer’s score makes it Nolan’s best-reviewed picture to date. His next best is the second film in his Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight (2008), which stands at 94 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.
Starring Irish actor Cillian Murphy in the lead role, Oppenheimer follows the life of theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, who spearheaded the development of the first nuclear bomb.
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Barbie, meanwhile, stars Margot Robbie as the titular Mattel doll who goes on a quest to visit the real world in order to understand her true purpose.
Cillian Murphy as J Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from ‘Oppenheimer’— (© Universal Pictures. All Rights Reserved.)
The Independent’s reviews went against the grain on Rotten Tomatoes. Our film critic Clarisse Loughrey awarded Gerwig five stars for Barbie while giving Nolan’s effort a near-perfect four stars.
“Barbie is one of the most inventive, immaculately crafted and surprising mainstream films in recent memory – a testament to what can be achieved within even the deepest bowels of capitalism,” she wrote.
Despite calling Oppenheimer Nolan’s “best and most revealing work”, Loughrey argued that the film is occasionally “a little too conscious of itself, and the ways cinema crafts its own reality”.
Writer and filmmaker Paul Schrader, meanwhile, described Nolan’s film as the “best” and “most important film of this century”.
“I’m not a Nolan groupie but this one blows the door off the hinges,” The Card Counter (2021) director wrote.
Both Oppenheimer and Barbie are out now in cinemas.
