'Barbie' vs. 'Oppenheimer' and the History of Summer Blockbuster Clashes

By Keith Phipps

The biggest question this summer movie season: Who will prevail when a sunny American icon meets an atomic bomb? On July 21st, two highly anticipated movies arrive in theaters: Christopher Nolan's biopic about the inventor of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig's Barbie, a fanciful comedy in which the beloved doll ventures out of her sun-soaked fantasyland and into the real world. It's a clash of the titans, albeit one in which the titans in question take the form of a haunted Cillian Murphy and a glowing Margot Robbie.

The clash also represents an increasingly rare instance of two big-budget, likely blockbusters squaring off on the same opening weekend. For years, studios have moved toward a one-big-film-per-week release strategy, particularly in the high-stakes world of the summer movie season. Where the holiday season remains a time of something-for-everyone, in which films tend to linger a little longer and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish can open opposite Avatar and not worry too much about being crushed, summer has largely come to be seen as an all-or-nothing bloodsport, one in which, the conventional wisdom goes, it's best to avoid head-to-head confrontations.

When there is counter programming, it tends to take the form of smaller films for specialized audiences. No one expected The Bob's Burgers Movie to best Top Gun: Maverick last year, for instance, but there was room for both. The Barbie vs. Oppenheimer clash seems to be an attempt to make counter programming work on a grand scale (though, as big ambitious movies made by two of the most exciting directors working, they’re obviously both must-sees for those who care about movies.) From a marketing perspective, one clearly skews more toward older, male viewers and the other toward younger, female viewers. If both audiences turn out in force, the theory goes, both movies will be successes without cannibalizing one another.

In other respects, however, July 21st feels like a throwback to the summer blockbuster seasons of yore when big films opening opposite each other was much more common. How did that work out? Let's look at some of the biggest match-ups of the past few decades.

Now revered as a magical summer for blockbuster movies, thanks to the release of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, The Road Warrior, TRON and other genre classics (including a few we’ll get to in a moment), the summer of 1982 also featured some box office match-ups that look bafflingly ill-advised. While it might be fun to imagine having the option of seeing Star Trek II and Poltergeist on the same opening weekend, imagine having to choose just one.

In some respects, the blockbuster machine was still in its infancy in the early ’80s. Jaws and Star Wars had created the model, of releasing big movies widely and all at once in the summer months, but studios were still attempting to play the long game and expected hit films to linger in theaters for months on end in ways they never do now. If moviegoers didn't catch one of these future classics right away, they’d have a chance to come back later. Those who turned out for Khan and Kirk next week could worry about the fate of Carol Anne down the line, or vice versa.

The Winner: Acknowledging the above, opening weekends did still matter. And in this first week out, Khan prevailed. But there's a pretty sizable asterisk next to that. Khan was playing in almost twice as many theaters as Poltergeist (which in turn opened in fewer theaters than the now-forgotten comedy Hanky Panky). In the end, both movies did extremely well with Khan coming just shy of $100 million and Poltergeist going $20 million over, both about 10x their budget.

A few weeks later, those seeking brand-new movies had two more plum options: Blade Runner and The Thing. Or, they could choose none of the above, if turned off by the mixed reviews for Blade Runner or the downright hostile ones that greeted John Carpenter's gooey exercise in arctic horror.

By The Editors of GQ

By The Editors of GQ

By Gerald Ortiz

The Winner: None of the above, really. Blade Runner came in second place in its opening weekend. That's not that bad considering its competition was E.T., but its first week haul of $6 million pleased no one. Still, it fared much better than The Thing, which didn't even crack the top five in its opening weekend, a blow to Carpenter's career.

If there's a polar opposite to the counter-programming strategy underpinning Barbie opening against Oppenheimer, it's this summer of ’84 match-up between two horror comedy classics. Ghostbusters and Gremlins are different films in many respects, but the Venn diagram between the perceived demographic targeted by both was surely almost a perfect circle at the time. Releasing them the same week surely looked like madness, even at a time when the summer blockbuster rules were a little less set in stone.

The Winner: Both. Ghostbusters edged out Gremlins in its opening weekend and was ultimately the bigger hit. But June 8th was the first of six consecutive weekends in which the two films occupied the first and second spots on the weekend charts. Maybe Barbie and Oppenheimer will similarly end up holding hands at the top of the charts this summer.

By The Editors of GQ

By The Editors of GQ

By Gerald Ortiz

Moviegoers had two choices of rebellious comic heroes taking on stuffy authority figures at learning institutions in June of 1986: Matthew Broderick or Rodney Dangerfield. The former took a whiz-bang tour of Chicago while playing hooky, while the latter enrolled in Grand Lakes University to help his struggling son and romanced Sally Kellerman. Who would audiences choose?

The Winner: This is a true "the answer may surprise you" scenario. Though the Hughes’ film has become a generational touchstone and Back to School merely a fondly remembered comedy, more moviegoers wanted to see Dangerfield in 1986. Back to School beat Ferris Bueller $14.7 million to $10.6 million in its opening weekend, and ultimately outperformed Hughes’ film by $20 million. Still, no one would call either a failure (and both are probably playing somewhere on cable as you read this).

In one corner: an upstart mechanical policeman new to the blockbuster game. In the other: the latest toothsome sequel to the original summer blockbuster.

The Winner: Neither, weirdly enough. A re-release of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs won the box office that weekend. This isn't that surprising. Even after the arrival of home video, Disney still regularly re-released its classic films to theaters, which the company was able to do thanks to a habit of taking its films out of circulation on VHS and DVD in the pre-streaming era. In the long run, Robocop became an enduring hit while the fourth Jaws film became a joke.

By The Editors of GQ

By The Editors of GQ

By Gerald Ortiz

In another example of counter-programming, Disney opted not to let the most-anticipated film in years have the weekend to itself in 1989, offering up a special effects-driven kids film as a more family friendly option.

The Winner: Batman, but that wasn't a surprise. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was a hit in its own right, if on a smaller scale than its competition. Still, as in the film itself, size is relative. No one walked away from its $130+ million domestic performance second guessing the decision to pit tiny kids against the Dark Knight. Even as studios have reconsidered releasing more than one big movie at once, this sort of counter-programming is still pretty common.

It's hard to figure out the logic behind five major studios releasing new films, each on over a thousand screens, on the same day in May 1991 other than the hope that a lot of people would be seeing a lot of movies during that Memorial Day weekend.

The Winner: Backdraft emerged from the pack as a clear winner with Hudson Hawk the clear loser. The Bruce Willis vehicle came in third, then quickly dropped off, a sign that the studio might have miscalculated how many fans would turn out to watch Willis wisecrack his way through an esoteric genre homage (not that the film, with the benefit of hindsight, doesn't have its charms). Thelma & Louise would prove longer lived than the competition, becoming the most talked-about, hotly debated movie of the year.

By The Editors of GQ

By The Editors of GQ

By Gerald Ortiz

Speaking of films that arrived on the heels of terrible press, the ambitious Kevin Costner vehicle Waterworld was plagued by tales of lavish spending and production woes. Perhaps sensing blood in the water, Sony released The Net the same weekend.

The Winner: A techno thriller starring Sandra Bullock as a woman so shy she orders pizza using the Internet (imagine that!), The Net easily recouped its relatively low budget. Waterworld performed better than expected at the box office, more than doubling The Net's $15 million opening weekend domestic gross, eventually eking out a profit over time. In the long run, they both won.

The there-can-only-be-one approach to scheduling summer blockbusters started to become the norm in the ‘90s precisely because of weekends like this one. The Rock had a neat premise—terrorists take over Alcatraz—and Sean Connery. But Connery's co-star, Nicolas Cage, seemed like an odd choice for an action hero in 1996, and director Michael Bay wasn't yet the brand name he is today. The Phantom was a new take on an old pulp hero, one of many such films that appeared in the years after Tim Burton's Batman. None had fared that well, but maybe The Phantom was a sleeper in the making?

The Winner: It was not. The Rock crushed The Phantom, ending plans for multiple sequels starring Billy Zane.

By The Editors of GQ

By The Editors of GQ

By Gerald Ortiz

August tends to be a place for misfit blockbusters, rolls of the dice rather than sure things. In 2000, three such films debuted at once: Paul Verhoeven's hard-R take on The Invisible Man, a story of independence and dancing on top of bars, and a Clint Eastwood-directed film about geriatric astronauts.

The Winner: It's a case of the winner being the loser. Hollow Man came out on top but underperformed relative to its budget, sending Verhoeven back to Holland after a long, unpredictable stint in Hollywood. Coyote Ugly and Space Cowboys found their audiences, however, drawing fans from opposite ends of middle age to become hits.

As we moved into a new decade, franchises came to dominate the summer season and such dust-ups became much more rare. Facing competition from a Transformers film, both Disney and Sony responded with comedies Disney with the rom-com The Proposal and Sony with the prehistory-set Year One, which would become Harold Ramis's final directorial effort.

The Winner: Revenge of the Fallen easily carried the weekend but The Proposal did extremely well too, drawing audiences with the promise of a contentious romance between Sandra Bullock, by then a summer movie staple, and Ryan Reynolds. Year One, by contrast, pretty much disappeared.

It's the kind of competition that we rarely see anymore, in part because of some pretty simple, if creatively crushing, studio logic: If you can have a huge hit with a franchise film like Transformers and a medium-big hit with a rom-com, why not just go for the big hit every time?

Hence, the almost complete disappearance of rom-coms and other alternatives to high-concept, IP-driven fare (a description that, to be fair, can also be applied to Barbie). And hence summer movie slates like the one we’re getting in 2023, which contains some instances of counter-programming — The Flash is premiering alongside Pixar's Elemental and the horror comedy The Blackening — but also plenty of weekends set to be dominated by one big movie. That makes Barbie squaring off against Oppenheimer all the more notable, especially since both movies aren't typical summer fare (and both look pretty great). The history, dating back to Gremlins and Ghostbusters, suggests it's possible that both could win. And that would be a victory for everyone hoping for a little more spice and a little less predictability when summertime rolls around.