Barbie dances into biggest debut for film directed by a woman with $155M
After months of memes, colorfully explosive merchandise, and general internet frenzy, the summer's most anticipated double feature — Greta Gerwig's Barbie and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, or Barbenheimer for short — is officially here and it's absolutely blasting past box office expectations.
It's safe to say that everyone was living in the Barbie world this weekend as the Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling-led film cruised all the way to the top of the box office with a massive $155 million debut, per Comscore. Gerwig's Kenergy-filled comedy also shattered the record for the biggest opening weekend for a female director ever, an achievement that was previously held by Captain Marvel co-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck after the superhero film earned $153 million in ticket sales in 2019.
Barbie was already on track toward a historic weekend at the box office after Warner Bros. reported that the comedy had earned $22.3 million gross from Thursday night previews alone, blowing past previous records held by popular tentpole franchises like The Batman ($21.6 million), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ($17.4 million), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 ($17.5 million), and Top Gun: Maverick ($19.3 million). The film, which currently holds a 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, earned an additional $182 million globally for a whopping combined weekend debut of $337 million. Come on Barbie, let's go party indeed.
Trailing after Barbie was her unofficial best pal Oppenheimer, which similarly defied previous box office projections with an explosive $80.5 million dollar weekend. Nolan's three-hour-long period drama — which sees Cillian Murphy star as the physicist behind the atom bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer — cemented itself as the number two film around the world, raking in $93.7 million at the global box office for a combined weekend estimate of $174.2 million.
Meanwhile, Angel Studios' Sound of Freedom continues see profits after AMC Theaters publicly denounced the viral conspiracy theories that the company was attempting to thwart the success of the film. It adds an additional $20 million to its domestic cume for a total of $124 million.
Tom Cruise's latest Mission: Impossible iteration may not have quite stuck the landing like it had hoped as it plummets to fourth place on just its second weekend in theaters. Following its less-than-ideal opening weekend, the spy thriller has added an extra $19.5 million to its domestic earnings for a total of $118 million. However, it more than tripled that number at the global box office, adding an additional $75.4 million to its $370 million cume.
And, last but certainly not least, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny rounds out the top 5 with $6.7 million for a domestic total of $159 million, $335 million globally.
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