Start the day with the darker fare: Christopher Nolan’s moody “Oppenheimer,” about the physicist who ran the Los Alamos Laboratory during the development of the atomic bomb. A morning screening is best, so you can get some fresh air, some sustenance other than Milk Duds, clear your head before Greta Gerwig’s “live-action, you-go-girl fantasia,” “Barbie,” the second half of the double feature known, for better or worse, as “Barbenheimer.”
“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” two of the summer’s biggest films, premiered yesterday, and, for what feels like 100 years now, breathless meme-makers and discriminating cineastes alike have been chattering about the correct order in which to see the movies back to back. The sanest move seems to be dark before light, or as one Barbenheimist told The Times by email, “My friends and I in Chicago are spending our day at the Alamo Drafthouse and seeing the films the way the Lord herself intended: ‘Oppenheimer’ at 10 a.m. with a black coffee / ‘Barbie’ at 4:20 p.m. with a big Diet Coke.”
Will Barbenheimer be the key, more than three years since the pandemic began, to getting fans back to theaters? The movie industry hopes so. Ticket sales for the year in the U.S. and Canada are down about 20 percent from the same period in 2019. Analysts predict that “Barbie” could take in $100 million domestically through Sunday; “Oppenheimer” around $50 million.
With fans tiring of the typical summer fare of new installments of old franchises, the studios behind the two movies “went all-in on original films, directed by notable auteurs with an interest in pushing the envelope,” Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst at Comscore, which compiles box office data, told The Times. “These are not the tried-and-true safe bets that are the hallmark of the summer movie season,” he said. Will the gambles pay off?
The real die-hards, of course, called in sick and took in Barbenheimer yesterday. If you’re one…
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