The “Barbenheimer” celebration, following the rare decision to release two tentpole movies on the same weekend, was shown to be more than just talk when both Barbie and Oppenheimer had very strong openings at the box office. The success of both movies has continued as both films are currently in the top ten films domestically for 2023. Unfortunately, now the whole Barbenheimer thing has been hit with some negative backlash that has resulted in Warner Bros. making very negative public comments about… itself.
As part of the Barbenheimer celebration on social media, we saw a lot of posts, memes, and fan-created art, that brought Margot Robbie’s Barbie together with Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer. The two films are distributed by different studios. Oppenheimer came from Universal, while Barbie came from Christopher Nolan's former studio WB. But the official Barbie Twitter account got in on the action, responding to some of the Barbenheimer images. However, this did not sit well with Warner Bros.’ Japanese arm.
Many of the Barbenhiemer images included elements of explosions or fire, referencing the atomic bombs that J. Robert Oppenheimer helped develop that were used on Japan at the end of World War II. Warner Bros. Japan posted a public message to Twitter condemning its North American arm’s decision to interact with the images, calling the situation “extremely regrettable." WB Japan has apologized to anybody upset by the images on behalf of its North American counterpart.
Following WB Japan’s public condemnation, WB North America has responded. The offending tweets made by the Barbie social media account have been deleted, and the parent company has apologized. In a statement published by Deadline, WB says…
Warner Brothers regrets its recent insensitive social media engagement. The studio offers a sincere apology.
It’s certainly a unique situation here. While it’s probably not that uncommon for different parts of the same movie studio to do things that upset each other, you’d expect a lot of that to be dealt with behind the scenes. Here it was decided by Warner Bros. Japan that the issue at hand needed to be addressed publicly.
It’s not exactly that much of a surprise why it was felt this needed to be handled in full view of the public when you think about it. The hashtag #NoBarbenheimer has been trending in Japan of late. It makes sense that residents of Japan would not find Barbenheimer as funny as others might. Japan is the only nation to ever have an atomic weapon used against it, so of course they don’t feel quite the same way about making light of a movie that deals with the bomb. WB Japan wanted to not only deal with this issue but be seen by the Japanese public doing so.
This is an important reminder that cultural differences are important and that we all see things through our own lens that might not represent everybody.
