Barbie Defeats Batman At The Box Office
When growing up, many siblings ended up pitting their Batman toys against Barbie, which makes a kind of sense…after all, between the Barbie mansion and that cool pink Corvette, she had enough of “those wonderful toys” to rival even Bruce Wayne.
Now, it looks like Barbie has found another way to fight Batman, and that’s at the box office. And according to IGN, Barbie is winning this fight: the film made $26 million on its fifth day, giving it a Tuesday box office that beat how much The Dark Knight had earned by its fifth day in 2008.
Barbie’s $26 million on day five day beat what The Dark Knight had earned by its fifth day in 2008
At this point, that impressive Tuesday turnout is just one more notch on Barbie’s belt when it comes to earning a killer box office. So far, the movie has made a whopping $214.4 million so far, and that number is only going to rise.
To put things in perspective, Barbie earned more on Tuesday than Aquaman earned on Christmas day in 2018, and that aquatic adventure went on to earn Warner Bros. over one billion dollars at the global box office.
And Barbie didn’t stop at beating the Tuesday box office for Batman and Aquaman, though that would already be impressive enough on its own. It turns out this film has the fifth highest Tuesday box office of all time, coming in only behind Spider-Man: Far From Home, Amazing Spider-Man, The Lion King, and Transformers.
Barbie is the fifth-highest Tuesday box office of all time
And while Oppenheimer earned an explosive $12 million at the box office on Tuesday, Barbie is far on track to out-gross that movie as well, meaning that she will defeat two major Christopher Nolan films (The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer) in one pink swoop.
Of course, for all the fun we had with the “Barbenheimer” memes, it’s no surprise that Barbie is going to (ahem) blow Oppenheimer away at the box office. As historically important as Oppenheimer is, and as star-studded as it is, the movie is mostly about men sitting in rooms and talking to each other.
Compared to that, can anyone be surprised that audiences were more drawn to the candy coating and nonstop humor of Barbie, an equally star-studded movie that is mostly about going on colorful adventures and having fun?
The killer performance of Barbie at the box office also manages to provide an unexpectedly happy ending to the rollercoaster ride Warner Bros. has been in all summer long.
After countless delays, the studio finally released the epic superhero movie The Flash last month, but between the movie’s weird CGI, its central star’s history of bizarre crimes, and the movie’s ultimate irrelevance when it comes to James Gunn’s all-new DCU, the movie went on to lose the studio $200 million. That makes it the biggest flop in Warner Bros. film history, but a mere one month later, Barbie is on track to be one of the studio’s biggest hits.
For all of Barbie’s much-deserved success at the box office, it looks like toymaker Mattel may be learning the wrong lessons from the film that defeated Batman, Aquaman, and the Flash.
Recently, Mattel films made the internet collectively groan with the announcement that they wanted multiple Barbie sequels and films based on other toys, including everything from He-Man to Hot Wheels. Hopefully, they’ll get the message that the one hit film is Kenough before they unleash that awful-sounding View-Master film onto an unsuspecting public as part of an awful new cinematic universe.
