A €21.6m (£18.5m) opening for Barbie and a €12.7m (£10.9m) opening for Oppenheimer have brought the UK-Ireland box office its biggest weekend since the release of Avengers: Endgame in 2019.
At the Irish box office, Barbie has quickly become the largest box office opening of the year, bringing in €2,098,132 over the weekend of June 21st-23rd, 2023. The other big release of the weekend (and the second-half of the viral fanmade double billing dubbed ‘Barbenheimer’) is Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which made €1,134,635 domestically.
Speaking on their social media, The Lighthouse Cinema thanked cinemagoers for “making the cultural phenomenon that is Barbenheimer the busiest and best weekend in 11 years” since their reopening. The Lighthouse saw a record 6,318 patrons pass through their doors over the weekend, with screenings of Barbie starting at 8am on Friday and continuing throughout the weekend. Their sister cinema in Galway, Pálás Cinema, had 2,623 patrons over the weekend. Many fans of the respective films arrived dressed in pink, and even some in Oppenheimer-inspired outfits. At the IFI, there were queues going out the door on Friday morning, with the first 100 ticket-holders to arrive for the 12:30 screening of Oppenheimer receiving a collectable 70mm filmstrip featuring a selection of frames from the film.
In the North American box office (US and Canada), Greta Gerwig’s Barbie made $162m in ticket sales from 4,243 locations, surpassing The Super Mario Bros. Movie as the biggest opening of any film this year so far. Internationally, the film has earned €321m, setting the record for the biggest opening weekend for a film directed by a woman. This title was previously held by 2019’s Captain Marvel, co-directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. The Cillian Murphy-led Oppenheimer has earned over €162m internationally, the biggest opening for any of Nolan’s films outside of his Dark Knight trilogy, and one of the biggest ever openings for a biographical drama with an 18 IFCO certificate.
In America, the combined Barbie-Oppenheimer opening weekend ($311 million) is now the fourth largest opening weekend in domestic cinematic history before adjusting for inflation. Currently, the top three highest-grossing opening weekends ever, in ascending order, were for 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($313 million), 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War ($314 million), and 2019’s Avengers: Endgame ($402 million). What is unusual about the ‘Barbenheimer’ weekend in comparison to these opening weekends, is that the majority of the weekend’s overall box office gross comes from two features and not one.
Source: Box Office Mojo / The New York Times
This marks the biggest opening weekend at the box office since audiences have returned to cinemas post-pandemic, a significant milestone in an era in which films being released simultaneously on streaming services and in cinemas has become more commonplace.
