‘Barbie’ Hits a Billion at the Global Box Office

The pop cultural sensation has well and truly translated its meme following and fanbase into huge ticket sales, the second movie to cross the mark this year.

Greta Gerwig attends the 'Barbie' Press Tour, Sydney Australia 2023. Photography by Caroline McCredie for Warner Bros/NBC Universal. Contact: jade.perry@nbcuni.com.

‘Barbie’ is proving to be much more than just a pop culture hit. The movie, which successfully opened with $162 million domestically, has broken another barrier. It is now the second film of 2023 to make a billion dollars at the worldwide box office.

And while ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ achieved the feat back in April, ‘Barbie’ has beaten it to the mark by a week –– hitting more than a billion globally in just those three scant weeks on release.

Barbie

"She's everything. He's just Ken."

PG-131 hr 54 minJul 21st, 2023

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Success for Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig attends the 'Barbie' Press Tour, Sydney Australia 2023. Photography by Caroline McCredie for Warner Bros/NBC Universal. Contact: jade.perry@nbcuni.com.

The runaway hit is also big for its director –– Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote (with Noah Baumbach) and directed the movie, becomes the first solo female filmmaker to have a billion-dollar movie.

In 2019, ‘Captain Marvel’ made more than $1.1 billion, but that was co-directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. And Jennifer Lee has enjoyed two billion-dollar earners with the ‘Frozen’ films, though both were co-directed with Chris Buck.

‘Barbie’s success is all the more impressive because it has clearly connected beyond the initial rush of memes and jokes around the first couple of trailers. The movie has captured the public imagination, and alongside Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’, has become one of the movie events of the year.

It just keeps on breaking records, including non-holiday weekend earnings and low drops in subsequent weeks.

The film, which also stars Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt, Simu Liu and Will Ferrell, had a budget of roughly $100 million, and while it had an extensive promotional campaign, word of mouth and a clutch of positive reviews have carried it to big money.

Could it hit $2 billion? Anything is possible at this point, though with the state of the theatrical business post-Covid, it’s more unlikely than before the pandemic. Still, it continues to bring in audiences.

Domestically, ‘Barbie’ has so far made $459 million, and $572 million internationally.

Star Margot Robbie jokingly told executives that she felt confident it could be a billion-dollar movie while meeting executives before it got a greenlight at Warners, as she revealed during the pre-release press rounds in an interview with Collider:

Elsewhere at the box office

Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in 'Oppenheimer,' written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.

‘Oppenheimer’, which has also been enjoying plenty of success of its own, is also managing to hold well at the box office. While giant shark movie ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ made it to second place in this weekend’s charts (with $30 million), Christopher Nolan’s latest was third with $28.7 million, enough to see off ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’, which took in $28 million.

That might seem like a problem for the Turtles, but the Paramount Pictures animated movie was produced for $70 million, which means it has less to earn before it becomes profitable.

As for ‘Oppenheimer’, it has earned $228.6 million domestically and $552.9 million worldwide. It is the highest-grossing R-rated movie of 2023 and marks the fastest a Universal movie with that classification has hit more than $200 million at home.

For Nolan, it now ranks as his fifth most successful movie of all time, passing ‘Dunkirk’ and is a big vindication for Universal, which saw a chance to secure his services after his dissatisfaction with how previous moviemaking home Warner Bros. handled ‘Tenet’ and treated other filmmakers during the pandemic, especially with its day-and-date theatrical/streaming policy.