Barbie opening-day box office clobbers The Batman, Spider-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy
Life in plastic is looking pretty fantastic for Barbie's tiny purse.
Warner Bros. announced Friday that its Margot Robbie–starring, Greta Gerwig–directed blockbuster collected a whopping $22.3 million box office gross from Thursday night previews, beating out similar one-night totals from high-profile tentpoles like The Batman ($21.6 million), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ($17.4 million), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 ($17.5 million), Top Gun: Maverick ($19.3 million), Avatar: The Way of Water ($17 million), The Hunger Games ($19.8 million), and more.
That means Barbie is pacing to take in at least $130 million over the weekend, which would be a landmark total for a Hollywood film directed by a woman.
Robbie stars in the well-reviewed project as the titular doll, who, alongside Ken (Ryan Gosling), travels to the "real" world from her plastic toy kingdom as she dives deeper into an existential crisis.
The movie has thus far received glowing praise from critics and audiences, holding an 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and posting a score of 81 on Metacritic.
Barbie has been playfully pitted against Christopher Nolan's (much darker) three-hour historical drama Oppenheimer, which also opened Friday and is pacing for a lower box office bow despite earning higher critical praise.
"In terms of how they moved and how they behaved, I wanted it to feel heightened, but I didn't want it to feel like a sketch," Gerwig recently told EW of designing Barbie's musical sequences. "So all the Barbies and Kens you see on the beach [and other dance sequence settings] hold themselves differently. Our choreographer said dancers, their bodies always have a direction that's different [from] normal people. So that was kind of like in this conception of Barbie Land, it's like a soundstage musical."
Barbie is now playing in theaters nationwide.
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