"Barbenheimer" Proves Franchise Overload Is Real

On my way home from my double feature of Oppenheimer and Barbie, a thought crossed my mind about Margot Robbie.

Three years ago, when Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn underperformed a month before the pandemic ramped up, we all questioned why it didn’t take off at the box office. Was the title too confusing? Was the February release date a bad choice? Was it too woke?(Stupid ass question). Was it because it was rated R?

At one point, we asked if Margot Robbie had enough star power to lead a comic book movie as the main character, since her first appearance as Harley was in the ensemble Suicide Squad, with Will Smith as the lead, and at the time we had to consider that maybe she didn’t, given how Birds of Prey’s $205.3 million worldwide box office was nothing to celebrate, even as the pandemic took over the planet in March.

Now, three years later, Robbie is front and center in a Barbie movie that just beat out Captain Marvel as the largest domestic opening weekend for a female-directed film($155 million) and the 4th-largest opening weekend in history.

That’s one hell of a turnaround for her star power, isn’t it? Clearly she must have turned a corner with one of her roles in between Birds of Prey and Barbie to help her get to this point, right? Except, none of the four movies she made in between those two, The Suicide Squad, Amsterdam, Babylon, and Asteroid City that released earlier this year, really set on the world on fire at all.

So what changed from Birds of Prey to Barbie for Robbie to become this big star that can lead a movie? Nothing. She already had that star power, going back to The Wolf of Wall Street, I, Tonya and other big roles for her in the past decade.

So then Birds of Prey’s underperformance had to be all that other stuff, right? The title, the release date, the wokeness and the rating. Except that Barbie is largely considered to be even more “woke” than Birds of Prey, changing the title three years ago didn’t improve box office one bit, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, despite being a bomb by Marvel Studios standards, still made more money in the month of February, and Barbie’s release date partner, Oppenheimer, opened to a surprising $80.5 million domestic opening weekend as a 3-hour long R-rated dialogue heavy biopic.

Wait, Oppenheimer made money too? In the SAME opening weekend? Come on, now.

No joke, it’s all there. $337 million worldwide for Barbie and $174.2 million worldwide for Oppenheimer. Considering both films were made for reportedly less than $150 million apiece, the collective $511.1 million earned in just three days is Hollywood’s biggest win of the year and it’s not even close. So…how the hell did Barbenheimer pull this off already?

The answer is infuriatingly simple: They’re not franchise or comic book movies.

2023 has been the year of underperformance in Hollywood, because it’s been overwhelmingly loaded with franchise movies for the first 6 months. Out of the 5 comic book movies released so far this year, two have made money(Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse), and only Spider-Verse made more money than its previous film. On top of that, franchise darlings like The Fast and the Furious, Transformers, Indiana Jones, and even Mission: Impossible, have all performed below previous box office expectations in some form.

Is the general audience finally telling us that they’re sick of franchise movies and are now clamoring for different fare at the theater? Maybe, but it’s likely even simpler than that.

Marvel Studios has released 32 films since 2008 and will release its 33rd this year(unless the strikes delay it) with The Marvels in November. After the Infinity Saga ended in 2019 with Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home as an epilogue, the pandemic hit and pushed Marvel Studios to release four films in 2021(Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Eternals, Spider-Man: No Way Home), three more in 2022(Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Wakanda Forever), and then ultimately three more this year, and that’s all in addition to NINE Disney+ MCU shows that have all released full seasons since 2021, from WandaVision to Secret Invasion.

That’s a lot. Seriously.

Then you have DC Films, now morphing into the autonomous DC Studios, releasing four movies in 2023, two of which have outright bombed in Shazam: Fury of the Gods and The Flash, a Blue Beetle movie releasing in August that won’t have a full press tour and marketing because of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and an Aquaman sequel that rumor has it could be pushed to 2024 for the same reasons.

Again, that’s a lot of franchise films in one year. Especially when you add Fast X, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One into the mix.

So it’s not that the audience decided it doesn’t like these franchises anymore. They just need a break from them because there’s SO MUCH of it out there now, and there’s only enough budget in a working class family’s home to see multiple movies in a year, so they’re being picky about it, especially since they know they can just wait three months for all of them to go to streaming apps.

Then Barbenheimer happened, and suddenly the general audience was presented something they hadn’t seen from the franchises in awhile: EVENT FILMS. Movies that they were told were so special and unique that not only do you have to see them in theaters first, but you have to see them on the same day because that’s how crazy special this is. Look at the posters, look at the shirts and other merch out there for it.

Funny enough, the two highest grossing movies of 2023, Avatar: The Way of Water(December 2022 release date) and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, seemed to follow the same example. Imagine that.

Don’t get me wrong, the franchises USED to do that all the time. Marvel was great at it, right? Every Avengers film was “can't miss” cinema before the pandemic, and movies like Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel were billed as special events, storyline-wise and culturally speaking.

DC has marketed three of its movies as event films in the past five years: Aquaman(2018), Joker(2019), and The Batman(2022). Funny how those are literally the highest-grossing DC films since the Josstice League disaster.

So perhaps what the audience is really telling Hollywood is that they’re still more than ready to go to the theater, so long as it’s a special enough event for them to spend the money on it. A third Ant-Man movie, a Shazam sequel and an 80-year old Indiana Jones that’s half CGI doesn’t cut it, but a Barbie movie and a massive biopic about the father of the atomic bomb on the same day? That’s worth double the price of admission, clearly.

If Hollywood wants its tentpole franchises to be more successful again, then it needs to scale back the number of movies its franchises are making, as well as the budgets for them. It’s no secret that Dial of Destiny, The Flash, Dead Reckoning Part One and even the Secret Invasion show all cost north of $200 million apiece, with a few just shy of $300 million. It’s beyond insane for these franchises to keep spending that much, especially when they won’t pay writers and actors a livable wage in the process.

Meanwhile, Barbie’s budget is a reported $145 million, and Oppenheimer’s $100 million, even though director Christopher Nolan may have alleged that it was closer to $180 million. It’s still not $200 million+ in the middle of other connected expensive projects.

James Gunn, co-head of DC Studios, knows all of this too. That’s why he stated months ago that his plan for DCU is to release two films and two shows per year, provided he gets it going the way he and Peter Safran want to out of the gate. Marvel Studios should follow suit with this as well, lest they put out more films that earn closer to Ant-Man 3’s box office than Guardians Volume 3, even with it still making less than Guardians Volume 2.

It seems simple, doesn’t it? Less movies per year, less money spent on the budgets, more room for the audience to afford to spend big on opening weekends and not just wait for streaming. Add that pesky two percent of streaming residuals and AI protections for creatives and everyone would be cooking with gas for sure.

Except, the studios are still playing hardball out of greed, and if Hollywood’s lazy copycat history is any indication, executives across the country are now all planning their own double feature release dates and getting their interns to come up with the next fusion hashtag name, because they’re convinced that’s all they need to do for another Barbenheimer to happen. Never mind the budgets, never mind the over saturation of content, and certainly never mind the writers and actors. ChatGPT can surely copy what Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig and their casts and crews are doing right now at no cost, can’t it?

Sadly, some moron at one of the studios has already started this email chain around the office, more than likely. Ah well. The hard way it is, then.