‘Barbie’ might have been knocked down to second place again at the domestic box office this weekend by ‘Gran Turismo’, which managed to take the top spot (yet only for the three-day weekend and only by $200,000, with final figures possibly changing that), but Greta Gerwig’s movie is now on track to surpass yet another record.
As of Monday, the movie had made $1.34 billion, which means it is $1 million from overtaking ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2’, the previous global champ. Of course, all of this has to be qualified with the usual “adjusted for inflation” argument, since ‘Deathly Hallows’ came out in 2011, when tickets prices were cheaper.
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Barbie: the story so far
Greta Gerwig attends the ‘Barbie’ Press Tour, Sydney Australia 2023. Photography by Caroline McCredie for Warner Bros/NBC Universal. Contact: jade.perry@nbcuni.com.
Directed by Gerwig, the film –– for anyone who has yet to see it –– brings the world of the iconic toy to life as Margot Robbie plays a Barbie living in “Barbie Land”, a place where variants of the character live happily: until she starts to realize she’s just not feeling the same way. Cue a trip to the real world…
‘Barbie’s success is all the more impressive because it has clearly connected beyond the initial rush of memes and jokes around the first couple of trailers. The movie has captured the public imagination, and alongside Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’, has become one of the movie events of the year.
It just keeps on breaking records, including non-holiday weekend earnings and low drops in subsequent weeks.
The film, which also stars Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt, Simu Liu and Will Ferrell, had a budget of roughly $100 million, and while it had an extensive promotional campaign, word of mouth and a clutch of positive reviews have carried it to big money.
Could it hit $2 billion? Anything is possible at this point, though with the state of the theatrical business post-Covid, it’s more unlikely than before the pandemic. Still, it continues to bring in audiences.
While backers/rights holders Mattel have naturally hinted at a whole world of follow-ups and spin-offs, there are no current and official announced plans.
Still Greta Gerwig, despite saying she had no ideas for a sequel, did say this to ‘People’ before the movie hit the billion mark:
“There’s a tone and a humor and a joy, and obviously the world is so beautiful. I want to go back to Barbie Land.”
Elsewhere at the Box Office
(L to R) Sang Heon Lee, Darren Barnet, Archie Madekwe, Emelia Hartford and Pepe Barroso Silva are GT Academy drivers in Columbia Pictures ‘Gran Turismo.’ Photo: Gordon Timpen.
The other buzzy film of the summer, Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’, is barreling towards the $800 million mark at the worldwide box office after earning $29.1 million from 7,555 screens in 82 territories. Nolan’s film, a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb has enjoyed a massive $777 million worldwide gross — an astonishing figure for a somber, R-rated drama. And the money may well keep rolling, in since its debut in China is coming soon.
‘Gran Turismo’ added $11 million to bring its global haul to just over $53 million. The racing film will still need to put the pedal to the metal if it hopes to turn a profit.
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Elsewhere in Warner Bros. stable, ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ added $15.2 million from 16,224 screens in 77 offshore markets. That brings its global gross to $352.5 million.
And unlike other Hollywood releases, which have struggled in China lately, the giant shark movie has gotten a big boost from that market, earning $112.9 million
Then there is ‘Blue Beetle.’ The superhero origin story earned an estimated $10 million for the weekend in 71 international markets and on 10,421 screens. Globally, the picture has earned $81.8 million, a disappointing result for a movie that cost more than $100 million to produce.
Greta Gerwig attends the ‘Barbie’ Press Tour, Sydney Australia 2023. Photography by Caroline McCredie for Warner Bros/NBC Universal. Contact: jade.perry@nbcuni.com.
‘Barbie’ continues to impress this weekend, staying at the top of the domestic box office for the fourth week in a row, while Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ continued to bring in the cash at roughly half the speed of Greta Gerwig’s film.
Elsewhere, the new releases didn’t make much of an impact, with one in particular failing to capture the audience’s imagination.
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Another successful weekend for ‘Barbie’
(Center) Margot Robbie as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ ‘Barbie,’ a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
‘Barbie ‘ took in $33.7 million this weekend, making for more than $526 million domestically. Outside the United States, the movie nudged past $657 million for a grand total of $1.18 billion global haul.
And the movie continues to earn accolades, including becoming the second-highest earning movie in Warner Bros. history (it has its sights on ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II’, which remains on the top spot with $1.315 billion).
For Gerwig, it was also a good weekend –– thanks to ‘Barbie’s success, she’s now the highest-grossing female filmmaker in the world. Her new film passed the earnings of ‘Frozen II’, which was co-directed by Jennifer Lee.
Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in ‘Oppenheimer,’ written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
While Christopher Nolan’s latest isn’t quite on the same level, it is showing remarkable holding power for a three-hour, talky biopic movie about a tricky subject. ‘Oppenheimer’ is now sitting at $649 worldwide and is the highest-grossing World War II movie, ahead of ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and Nolan’s own ‘Dunkirk’.
‘Oppenheimer’ saw off the new releases –– mostly because there was only one wide-ish new arrival, and it definitely make much of an impact on the charts.
Third place went to animated holdover ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’ which has so far earned more than $72 million domestically. And giant shark movie ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ took in $12.7 million for fourth place, with a $54. 1 million total (both of those movies are also seeing a boost from takings elsewhere in the world).
Universal’s latest attempt to open up its horror vault fared about as well as the sailors on the titular boat as ‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ docked at fifth place with an anemic $6.5 million.
The long-developing terror title adapted from a chapter of ‘Dracula’ –– which sees the bloodsucker cause havoc on the ship as he travels from Transylvania to England –– opened to even lower figures than the studio’s latest attempt to mine the vampire’s story for a movie.
This year’s ‘Renfield’, which landed in April, is considered far from a success, and that opened to $8 million. ‘Demeter’ will have to hope that global audiences help to boost it –– though some markets, such as the UK, don’t even have a date for the movie yet.
Finally, Bleecker Street Media’s ‘Jules’, which sees Ben Kingsley as a mild-mannered small-town resident whose life is upended when an alien crash lands in his backyard. The movie, which debuted on 780 screens, earned $1 million.
Greta Gerwig attends the ‘Barbie’ Press Tour, Sydney Australia 2023. Photography by Caroline McCredie for Warner Bros/NBC Universal. Contact: jade.perry@nbcuni.com.
‘Barbie’ is proving to be much more than just a pop culture hit. The movie, which successfully opened with $162 million domestically, has broken another barrier. It is now the second film of 2023 to make a billion dollars at the worldwide box office.
And while ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ achieved the feat back in April, ‘Barbie’ has beaten it to the mark by a week –– hitting more than a billion globally in just those three scant weeks on release.
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Success for Greta Gerwig
Greta Gerwig attends the ‘Barbie’ Press Tour, Sydney Australia 2023. Photography by Caroline McCredie for Warner Bros/NBC Universal. Contact: jade.perry@nbcuni.com.
The runaway hit is also big for its director –– Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote (with Noah Baumbach) and directed the movie, becomes the first solo female filmmaker to have a billion-dollar movie.
In 2019, ‘Captain Marvel’ made more than $1.1 billion, but that was co-directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. And Jennifer Lee has enjoyed two billion-dollar earners with the ‘Frozen’ films, though both were co-directed with Chris Buck.
‘Barbie’s success is all the more impressive because it has clearly connected beyond the initial rush of memes and jokes around the first couple of trailers. The movie has captured the public imagination, and alongside Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’, has become one of the movie events of the year.
It just keeps on breaking records, including non-holiday weekend earnings and low drops in subsequent weeks.
The film, which also stars Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt, Simu Liu and Will Ferrell, had a budget of roughly $100 million, and while it had an extensive promotional campaign, word of mouth and a clutch of positive reviews have carried it to big money.
Could it hit $2 billion? Anything is possible at this point, though with the state of the theatrical business post-Covid, it’s more unlikely than before the pandemic. Still, it continues to bring in audiences.
Domestically, ‘Barbie’ has so far made $459 million, and $572 million internationally.
Star Margot Robbie jokingly told executives that she felt confident it could be a billion-dollar movie while meeting executives before it got a greenlight at Warners, as she revealed during the pre-release press rounds in an interview with Collider:
Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in ‘Oppenheimer,’ written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
‘Oppenheimer’, which has also been enjoying plenty of success of its own, is also managing to hold well at the box office. While giant shark movie ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ made it to second place in this weekend’s charts (with $30 million), Christopher Nolan’s latest was third with $28.7 million, enough to see off ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’, which took in $28 million.
That might seem like a problem for the Turtles, but the Paramount Pictures animated movie was produced for $70 million, which means it has less to earn before it becomes profitable.
As for ‘Oppenheimer’, it has earned $228.6 million domestically and $552.9 million worldwide. It is the highest-grossing R-rated movie of 2023 and marks the fastest a Universal movie with that classification has hit more than $200 million at home.
For Nolan, it now ranks as his fifth most successful movie of all time, passing ‘Dunkirk’ and is a big vindication for Universal, which saw a chance to secure his services after his dissatisfaction with how previous moviemaking home Warner Bros. handled ‘Tenet’ and treated other filmmakers during the pandemic, especially with its day-and-date theatrical/streaming policy.
‘Barbie’ Director/Writer Greta Gerwig attends a Fan Event in Seoul, Korea. Photo Credit: Chang Ho.
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Opening in theaters on August 4th, ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ largely sticks to the giant monster movie franchise playbook –– which is to say, if your hero faces down one big beast in the original, they have to be confronted by more in the sequel.
And while this example is a largely brain-free, silly summer blockbuster experience, it does offer enough thrills and spills that you won’t feel cheated come the end.
Jason Statham returns as diving expert Jonas Taylor who, along with Jiuming Zhang (Wu Jing) leads a daring research team on an exploratory dive into the deepest depths of the ocean.
Their voyage spirals into chaos when a malevolent mining operation threatens their mission and forces them into a high-stakes battle for survival –– because their enemies are not just from the natural world this time.
Pitted against colossal Megs and relentless environmental plunderers, our heroes must outrun, outsmart, and outswim their merciless predators in a race against time.
With this second movie, ‘The Meg’ films confirm themselves as Jason Statham’s ‘Fast & Furious’ (yes, we know he’s popped up in a few of them and co-starred in spin-off ‘Hobbs & Shaw’). By that, we mean a franchise that treats the laws of physics (and here, nature) like something to be ignored in the name of spectacle and a story that almost everyone else is treating with the tongue-in-cheek style something such as this suggests while the leading man barrels his way through more seriously.
To give Statham some credit, though, even he indulges in how goofy all of this is occasionally, showing more self-awareness than Vin Diesel ever does in the ‘Fast’ movies. His Jonas Taylor embraces more of the team effort this time, joking around with Cliff Curtis’ Mac and Sophia Cai’s Meiying. Jing Wu, meanwhile, fits right in with the gang, bringing his own action chops to the role (at one point, having cameras strapped to his body during one particularly tricky, explosive sequence).
While director Ben Wheatley might seem like an odd choice to direct a movie of this style and scale –– after all, he’s been best known for small-scale British horrors such as ‘Kills List’, ‘A Field in England’ and ‘In the Earth’, though he has shown plenty of versatility in his genre-hopping to date between the satirical likes of ‘High Rise’ and the dramatic trappings of ‘Rebecca’. Here, he brings some level of subversion (alongside submersibles) to a loud, wacky action summer wannabe blockbuster.
Alongside writers Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris, he has plenty of fun dreaming up scenarios to put people at risk from the giant sharks, and even (as seen in one of the movie’s trailers) kicks things off by winding the clock back to the Cretaceous period to show a Meg proving to be the alpha predator even in a world where dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Perhaps a sly wink at ‘Jurassic Park’ and its own ‘Jurassic World’ sequel trilogy, the most recent of which had its own nod towards prehistory.
Plus, if you were coming to this for big beasties, the team behind ‘Meg 2’ certainly wants you to go home satisfied, throwing in multiple Megalodons (including one that Jing Wu’s character believes he has tamed after finding it injured as a pup) plus some prehistoric reptilians and a massive cephalopod, all fellow inhabitants of the dark waters of the trench who make it to the surface world through reasons that, let’s be honest really don’t matter.
Naturally, Wheatley can only do so much when it comes to a big studio title such as this, which has an established format and runs on rails much like a theme park ride. Statham’s Taylor is very much your stock, occasionally quippy hero type (after dispatching on particularly resistant baddie, he says, “so long, chum”, which would make even James Bond wince) while everyone else is either in the friend group, and therefore are granted enough personality to make it out alive, or shark bait.
The twists and turns are visible from roughly six miles away (and the villainous characters, with one exception, are pantomime baddies) and there are some logic gaps in the story big enough for a giant, toothy predator to swim through. This is also strictly on the same lines as the original when it comes to the kills: PG-13, which means while Wheatley and the writers have a few inventive moments, it’s an almost entirely bloodless affair where the massive monsters swallow people rather than biting them, and the smaller ones rarely get to do much more than chomp once.
Also, while the trailers have been full of the sharks let loose at an island resort, that is mostly relegated to the final act, the proceeding running time given over to a tense sequence in the trench where our heroes are fighting for their lives against more than just the toothy terrors. It’s perfectly serviceable but never as pleasurable as the full-on Megalodon chaos.
Most disappointingly for a film that wants to be a big-budget version of those Megashark Vs. Giant Dolphin-style movies (think ‘Sharknado’ with ‘Godzilla’ production values), some of the visuals are shockingly basic, a few of the effects less convincing than one of those cheapo cash-in films and the whole thing coming across as rushed and re-shot. It’s also one of those movies that smacks of elements being inserted so that it’ll play well in China –– not a negative per se, but it’s so blindingly obvious at times as to be annoying.
Still, if you enjoyed the first ‘Meg’ back in 2018 and you were hoping that the sequel would offer more of the same, just bigger, louder and with even less of a brain, ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ certainly delivers on that front. And if you’re willing to put up with the more ridiculous elements, it’s worth the dive, even if it isn’t a deep one despite the title.
‘Meg 2: The Trench’ is produced by Apelles Entertainment, Warner Bros. Pictures, di Bonaventura Pictures, and CMC Pictures. It is scheduled to release in theaters on August 4th, 2023.
It’s all change for Warner Bros. and DC today, as some of the companies’ highest-profile movies are upping sticks and moving around the release date calendar – mostly to further in the future.
Warners partly puts the shifts down to covid delays affecting production and post-production on some of these giant movies, though there is also the sneaking suspicion that this is a way to get a few out of the way of Marvel or, in the case of the ‘Aquaman’ sequel, ‘Avatar 2’, especially given James Cameron’s history with the box office and the watery elements of his long-awaited sci-fi sequel, which is due in theaters on December 16th. (‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’ was originally slated for that date).
Word of the changes – to ‘Super-Pets’ and ‘Black Adam’ at least – came first from Dwayne Johnson, who hit Instagram to deliver a typically positive message about his two next releases shifting back. Mostly, he seemed pumped about ‘Black Adam’s chances to play through Halloween and other holidays without (he didn’t say it, it’s implied), ‘The Flash’ to run up against.
‘Black Adam, meanwhile, stars Johnson as the usually villainous character from the ‘Shazam!’ world. From the looks of everything about the movie so far, though, it appears it’ll channel the anti-hero version that has more recently been in DC Comics.
The movie also features Pierce Brosnan, Noah Centineo, Aldis Hodge, Quintessa Swindell, Sarah Shahi and Marwan Kenzari, and will now hit theaters on October 21.
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‘The Flash’, starring Ezra Miller as the speedy hero pushing his powers to the limit in order to save his parents from death and jail, is dashing from its original November 4 slot to June 23, 2023. The movie will also see Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman for the first time since 1992’s ‘Batman Returns.’
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‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’, the Jason Momoa-starring sequel directed once more by James Wan, dives from a December 16 slot to March 17, 2023.
One movie actually shifting forward rather than back is superhero sequel ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’. Zachary Levi returns as the titular hero, with Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu as the villains. That is stepping into the December 16 slot this year vacated by the Aquaman sequel.
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And finally, one WB movies lands its release date, as ‘Meg 2: The Trench’, directed by Ben Wheatley, is now swimming in on August 4 next year.
That movie sees Jason Statham back as diver and captain Jonas Taylor, who must once more confront a giant shark looking to destroy property and eat unwitting swimmers.
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Proof positive, then, that in this day and age it’s better to write your movie reminders in pencil rather than pen.
(L to R) Dwayne Johnson as Krypto and John Krasinski as Superman in Warner Bros.’ ‘DC League of Super-Pets.’
