This Barbie is Breaking Box Office Records

A look at the movie's box office and some speculation where it might end up, and why it matters

Hi Barbies! Hi Kens!

I love the Barbie movie! It is my favorite film so far of 2023, and we recently covered it on our podcast Kiss Your Franchise Goodbye (though I purposefully didn’t appear on that episode— no need to Kensplain the importance of the film to a panel full of amazing Barbies).

But recently it’s been breaking some important box office records, and it’s worth unpacking that (as one of the only objectives metrics of filmmaking we have), what it means, and why it matters.

Which records did Barbie break so far?

So, by the numbers, as of the end of the weekend of Aug 20, 2023, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has made $567,132,865 at the US box office, an additional $659,987,253 internationally, for a total of $1,227,120,118.

It is on track to beat out The Super Mario Brothers Movie ($574 million), likely later this week, to be the top-grossing movie of 2023.

It is also, quietly, the top grossing comedy of all time, DOUBLING the gross of its closest competitors.

But to some note, Greta Gerwig became the first woman to direct a film that grossed over a billion dollars, and Barbie is now the highest grossing film directed by a woman singly and the highest grossing live action film directed by a woman. Both Frozen ($1.28 billion) and Frozen II ($1.45 billion) were co-directed by Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, and Barbie is likely to eventually overtake them.

But thou shalt not pit women against women— this record really says more about the lack of opportunity for women as directors to get to helm projects like those that populate most of the top 25 grossing films of all time— most of them sequels or pieces in major franchises— than it does the film itself. A win for Jennifer Lee is a win for Greta Gerwig is a win for Patty Jenkins is a win for Nia DeCosta is a win for Chloe Zhao is a win for Ava DuVernay is a win for every other director trying to break through— and not just women. Because our current system keeps everybody down.

To wit, promoting his first film, Randall Park told Rolling Stone:

I feel like, just in general, this industry is taking the wrong lessons. For example, Barbie is this massive blockbuster, and the idea is: Make more movies about toys! No. Make more movies by and about women!

The success of Barbie is, at its core, a threat a white-male-centric-Hollywood. And because money is the only language the studios truly understand, it is, sadly, part of the answer/case we have to make.

The Most Important Record Barbie Has Broken

And to that point, perhaps the most important data point is that Barbie has become the highest grossing film ever for Warner Bros. studios, beating out The Dark Knight. The bean-counters and their spreadsheets will decide what the budget will be for Greta Gerwig’s next project based on Barbie’s grosses, and the smart ones will also start greenlighting projects that are more female-centric.

But perhaps the most ironic part of this was I personally began to see so much more pushback from other people on the internet absolutely incredulous that Gerwig and Barbie could take down Christopher Nolan and Batman.

This was the absolutely best take:

I had to do a spit take here, and I’m still not convinced that “C” here isn’t playing a character. Because… “I’ve waited my whole life for a Magilla Gorilla movie” and “I didn’t think the Barbie movie would make 10 cents” is A. TAKE.

My other favorite take was from a contrarian who merely responded to a story about Barbie breaking the records with simply the word “Inflation.”

Ok, so this is actually something to discuss, because it is something we can likely quantify and put in context. Is Barbie the bigger movie than The Dark Knight? Let’s see what the data tells us.

Adjusting for Inflation: nerding out on BoxOfficeMojo vs. The-Numbers.com

So according to which website you’re looking at, you might get a different story of what the biggest movies of all time are, adjusted for inflation.

First, Box Office Mojo— they’re the big dogs on the box office numbers website scene, around for forever, integrated with IMDB, and… owned by Amazon.

Their list of inflation-adjusted domestic grosses is useful because they include a plethora of historical data, so I actually give them the edge here:

If you click over, you see The Dark Knight is at #33, and they calculate the gross adjusted for inflation (to 2019 ticket prices— more on this in a second) at $681,216,919.

So compare this to The-Numbers.com’s list of top domestic box office adjusted for inflation:

Notice anything different? Like… about half of the movies are missing— specifically anything from before 1977? Well, it’s true. The-Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t have great, well, numbers from prior to 77 because, frankly, prior to then they weren’t published regularly.

It was only with the advent of the modern blockbuster— Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters, E.T.— that weekly box office receipts began to be published regularly. Also, you’ll notice the numbers are different between films. Box Office Mojo has Star Wars at 1.6 billion, The-Numbers 1.5. What gives?

Well, they both use somewhat different methodologies: BOM just pegs the number to inflation, and specifically they’re using 2019 as a year of comparison. The-Numbers does the math backwards, and assumes an average ticket price for the year of release and divides it to find number of tickets sold, then multiplies that by today’s average ticket price. I personally find that methodology more sound, because I feel like what we’re trying to gauge is overall popularity (and therefore some measure of quality or cultural saliency)— how many people went to see the movie, vs. how much they shelled out to get in the door.

But regardless, The-Numbers has The Dark Knight at #24 — $681,038,991. That’s not far off from BOM’s $681,216,919. Regardless, what we’re trying to answer is “how much money does Barbie have to make at the US Domestic Box Office to beat The Dark Knight adjusted for inflation.

And I think we can answer that as $682 million.

Ok, Weisenheimer, is $682 million that realistic?

In a word, yes.

Let’s take The-Numbers for a spin and use one of my favorites of its features: comparison charts. I took 4 other high-grossing movies from the last 3 years (Spider-Man: No Way Home [#9 all-time highest grossing film— also, wtf?], Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Super Mario Bros. as comparables, as well as The Dark Knight for a baseline.

You can click on that to go look at it if you like. (This is also why I like The-Numbers: I can share my charts and you can go verify them, or tinker as you like.)

So that purple line is Barbie. The blue line at the top is Spider-Man (ouch- probably not catching that) and the bottom teal line is The Dark Knight.

So what’s important is that Barbie is beating all of its other comparables in a week-by-week comparison. So if it follows Mario, Avatar, and Maverick, it will top out near one of their tops. But since it’s actually doing better than them, it’s reasonable to assume Barbie will glide gracefully out of her dreamhouse and land softly somewhere ahead of Top Gun: Maverick. So somewhere north of $700 million seems not only probable but likely. That’s going to beat The Dark Knight’s inflation-adjusted $682 million mark.

But also, compare for a second the curvature of the lines: Barbie is not evening out or dipping anywhere near as fast as the rest of the films. On Day 31 of its release, Top Gun: Maverick was at $523 m; Barbie is at $567. Extrapolate that out and assume Barbie has similar legs to Maverick and it could be headed to $750 m+.

But let’s not set unreasonable expectations, standards much higher than we’d set for a male-centric film only so when it doesn’t meet them we can call it a failure. Even if Barbie doesn’t make a single cent more, it is already a HUGE success and the biggest movie of 2023.

Headwinds and Tailwinds

Now one thing that doesn’t make this exactly apples to apples is that both Avatar and Top Gun had the benefit of being in large format screens, and therefore commanding more per ticket, which helped their long tail.

Sadly, if Barbie is going to really whoosh by them, it will be, like Grace Kelly once said, backwards and in heels. So Barbie may fall short— while Oppenheimer (rightfully so) continues to sell out 70 mm IMAX screens in the two dozen or so places that have them, Barbie will make its money in the regular cineplex screens across the country.

But what could Barbie do to astound them all? First— Keep going strong through the summer and past Labor Day. (Someone do a smart “Wear pink after Labor Day” viral campaign encouraging people to do see it again?) The box office for the next few months is, well, sparse. I would bet $20 Barbie reclaims the #1 spot next week and holds it. For how long? Well, how many times do we want to go see it?

There’s also a really off-the-wall scenario that I think would be amazing and blow everybody’s minds: with an actors’ and writers’ strike continuing through the fall and going into the end of the year, studios are going to start getting panicky and moving films from November/December to later in 2024.

If Warner Bros is smart, (and I’m noting that their CEO David Zaslav is probably the dumbest man in show business, so maybe not) they might take this opportunity to move, say, Aquaman 2 (or less likely The Color Purple or Wonka, but certainly not Dune— don’t touch Dune!!!!).

And if they do, it would be a great time to slot Barbie in for a return run at the theaters! Especially if it’s done as part of an expansive “For Your Consideration” campaign for Greta Gerwig for directing and writing, for Margot Robbie and America Ferrera for acting, for costume design, for production design, for cinematography, for editing, for sound, for best song… for all the awards!

With a several week long boost at the end of the year, Barbie could go even further. Maybe she can catch Spider-Man— who knows? With Barbie, anything is possible.

Finally, Box Office is Hogwash

A twist ending!

Look, box office doesn’t really mean anything at the end of the day in terms of whether the film is good or not. At the end of the year, I can almost guarantee half of my top 10 will have made less than $20 million dollars.

But where it does matter, as mentioned above, is in pushing the bean-pushers to make new and better films. And if Barbie’s success means dozens of Greta Gerwigs now get their chances to make their small-budget films, then that’s what we need. We need a system that incubates and encourages Frances Has and Lady Birds and Little Womens.

I’m hoping we’ll see more of that with The Marvels and we see more studios putting money behind projects where the creative team and decision-makers are primarily women (and especially women of color) to make whatever passion projects they want.

But ultimately, how many dollars something makes is a poor standard of how good a piece of art something is. It only represents what its extractive value is for a broken system that prioritizes profit over creativity. What a “Ken” thing to do— to place a number on something and then say because the number is higher that it is therefore better and everything must be in competition with each other. We Ken do better.

Let’s hope the real lesson we all learn from Barbie is that whatever you’re striving for, it is important, and you are important, no matter how much money you make.

But Barbie also rules. Go see it again and make someone mad because it’s breaking box office records.

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