Warner Brothers/Universal
Barbenheimer was completely unexpected, but the studio behind it Barbie was happy to support the idea, said Dana Nussbaum, executive vice president of worldwide marketing at Warner Bros. Pictures, calling the unusual two-feature madness one of the few unexpected and welcome twists in the Greta Gerwig blockbuster’s box office run.
“It was a complete surprise for us. But one that we found incredibly delightful,” she said during a Q&A at New York Ad Week.
A joke starring Margot Robbie and Oppenheimer, Universal’s biopic of Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, couldn’t be more extraordinary,” she said. “It was a great example of surprise. By the way, I would like to take credit for this, but (it was) absolutely, not at all designed by us. It happened very organically, but we built on it.”
“When we saw that it was out there somewhere, and that there was a conversation around it, we made sure that Greta and Margot… went to have a look. Oppenheimer. They took the photograph and it kind of kicked off this whole spirit that was so incredible because from the very beginning people wanted to pit the two films against each other.”
Barbie grossed over $1.4 billion worldwide ($635 million domestic). The film premiered alongside Christopher Nolan’s film on July 21 and grossed $942 million internationally ($323 million domestically).
“We realized there was a place for both, and what an amazing celebration of culture and cinema that would have room for both, and kind of do this double feature,” Nussbaum said.
The film bathed the world in pink and took over social media thanks to a masterful marketing campaign that also followed fans wherever they gathered, from Chrissy Teigen’s Barbie shoe competition to the Ryan Gosling ballad “I’m Just Ken,” most recently parodied by Pete. Davidson Hong SNL last weekend.
Barbie it is now Warner Bros.’ highest-grossing film.” 100 years old, the highest-grossing film by a female director at the domestic box office and the biggest global film released in 2023. Mattel’s iconic doll going on a journey of female empowerment is integral to the story, but according to Nussbaum, it’s not something the studio forced.
“None of us lost sight of the fact that this is indeed a great responsibility, but also a huge opportunity. But we were very careful to make sure that we stuck to the spirit of personalizing this campaign and letting the audience decide how they interact with it. We never framed it as a feminist story, we never spoke out or said anything like that because we wanted everyone to have their own experience, just like we were all pleasantly surprised by the film when we first saw it. we wanted that revelation and that surprise to be kept for the audience and for the audience to decide what they were reacting to and what was really important to them.”
When WB executives “first read the script, it became very clear that Greta had really given us this movie,” she said, “and that there was something about it that if we did it right, we really had the opportunity to not only create a cultural moment, but also make a significant difference. To really just change what a shaky film looks like, and how you know women-led films are coming to market, and who they’re for, and how they perform at the box office.”