REGINA - Welcome to Cairns on Cinema where we do our annual review of how the summer box office went for this year.
If you had tuned into my last column, things were not looking too bright. It was Hollywood's Long, Hot Summer. Highly-budgeted releases had been consistently underwhelming at the box office, with The Flash doing badly, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny missing expectations, and then Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One underperforming as well.
What’s worse, this was the summer of labour strife in Hollywood, with the writers and the actors both on the picket lines. Hollywood was in a panic, looking for some movie -- any movie -- to bail them out and rescue the summer blockbuster season.
It turned out, they did get saved. On July 21 came the twin releases of Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same weekend. Two diametrically opposed movies: one about the popular doll from Mattel, the other about the guy who brought you the atom bomb.
Together, the release weekend was dubbed “Barbieheimer” by observers and the hype for it just grew and grew. Word of mouth quickly spread that this would be an event, a happening, and people showed up in droves wearing Barbie outfits and the like.
It ended up turning into one of the biggest box office weekends ever at the cinemas.
Barbie hauled in $162 million domestic to be the top opening weekend of the year, surpassing Super Mario Bros., while Oppenheimer hauled in $82 million. For all the movies, the haul was over $300 million for the fourth biggest weekend box office of all time.
So much for my theory that the latest Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movie would win the summer. That prediction got blown up by Oppenheimer's nuclear weapons.
After the success of Top Gun: Maverick, I thought maybe the appetite for action would still be there. This latest Mission: Impossible movie this summer was up to the usual high standard of stunts and car chases, so the quality of the finished product had little to do with it. The latest release had also seen delays by COVID-19, so it had been a while since the last one. You’d think fans would have been excited to see the franchise come back.
What happened? I think the fact it was another sequel -- the seventh, to be exact -- worked against it, because we have seen it all before with Mission: Impossible. Some are speculating maybe this franchise didn't push the envelope enough this time. But what is really getting the lion’s share of the blame was its release date of July 12, smack into a very crowded field of blockbuster releases.
Just nine days into its run, Mission: Impossible lost a ton of IMAX screens to Oppenheimer, which killed any momentum. For the summer, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One had earned a domestic $170 million, in eighth place this summer behind the latest Indiana Jones movie ($174 million) and even Sound of Freedom ($182 million)(!). Worldwide, it has earned $563,732,689. Paramount was surely hoping for much more than that.
People are now speculating on what might have been if they had rolled this movie out in May or June, or possibly November. The late fall might have been the best date for it, that tends to be an “action movie” time of year (ie. James Bond movies), but we’ll never know. Anyway, it is back to the box office drawing board for Part Two.
The final totals for the domestic summer box office are as follows, according to numbers from Box Office Mojo :
Barbie $612,331,509
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse $381,276,759
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 $358,995,815
Oppenheimer $320,688,525
The Little Mermaid $298,148,451
Worldwide, courtesy Box Office Mojo:
Barbie $1,402,676,857
Oppenheimer $890,988,955
Guardians of the Galaxy $845,536,306
Fast X $704,709,660
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse $689,640,476
Barbie currently ranks as the top box office movie of the year both domestic and worldwide, toppling The Super Mario Bros. Movie. It’s going to be difficult, likely impossible, for any other 2023 release to beat it the rest of this year.
Why did Barbie and Oppenheimer prove to be so big? I’ve said it before elsewhere: it’s as simple as people looking for something new and different at the cinemas, something fresh. I mean, how many more Marvel or DC movies must we see? How many more superheroes? The public clearly wanted something else, and this was fresh material.
Oppenheimer scored because you had a known quantity in director Christopher Nolan delivering a fresh take on a major moment in history — the development of nuclear weapons.
As for Barbie, finally someone in Hollywood figured out they could make a fortune off of the Barbie toy franchise that had dominated doll sales at your local toy department. Heck, Hollywood did it with Transformers, Lego, Super Mario Bros. and countless other toys or games.
They had A-list talent involved with Greta Gerwig directing and Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling starring, so it had some things going for it.
The other phenomenon, if you haven’t noticed, was this was a big summer for young women and girls spending money on entertainment.
The female audience has been unappreciated for years by the Hollywood studios as we all know, with their recent obsession with male-oriented superhero movies and so on. It was about time that a potential blockbuster came along that could cater to this underserved market and connect with women and girls in a big way, and Barbie was it. Females drove the movie ticket sales this summer, there was no doubt. At the same time, females were driving demand for concert tickets for Taylor Swift and her Eras Tour, whose sales are going through the roof. The Eras Tour is tracking to beat out Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour to become the highest grossing concert tour of all time.
The reason I mention Taylor Swift is because a movie about her tour — titled Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour — has been announced for the weekend of October 13. Chaos has predictably reigned supreme. People are tripping over themselves scrambling to buy movie tickets for opening weekend, with presales over $50 million, and there are predictions this could be the biggest grossing concert tour film of all time.
It is already creating release date havoc. It was announced that the release of The Exorcist: Believer has been moved up a week to Oct. 6, to avoid the steamroller that the Eras Tour movie is surely going to be on Oct. 13. Other movies are also scrambling to get out of the way.
In the end, Hollywood did indeed get its Hollywood ending for the summer box office. It hit over $4 billion for the first time since 2019 and is running almost 17 percent ahead of last year, thanks largely to the momentum from “Barbieheimer.” Thank you very much, Barbie and Oppenheimer. And the fall is looking bright, indeed. Thank you very much, Swifties.
These developments certainly soften the mortal blow being dealt to Hollywood by the continuing Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Both continue to wreak havoc on the entertainment industry with no end in sight, and are preventing a ton of your favorite stars from coming to Canada and hitting the red carpets at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
I close by simply saying that I have picked the right year to not live in Toronto, again! That’s all for the moment.
You can no longer count on social media to deliver important news to you. Keep your news a touch away by bookmarking SASKTODAY.ca's homepage at this link.
Subscribe to SASKTODAY.ca newsletter to get our daily news to your inbox.
