Exactly! I need something hilarious and hot pink, and Barbie looks like it'll deliver both. And I say this as someone that once moderated a large community dedicated to superhero media...
The talent on this film is stacked. I was interested the second I saw who was attached.
Greta Gerwig was an indie darling for a decade before she went on to make two highly praised, award-winning films back-to-back.
Noah Baumbach is known for mumblecore indie dramedies like The Squid and the Whale and recently got an Oscar nomination for Marriage Story. The irony of him working on a Barbie movie is intriguing enough.
Margot Robbie has brilliant charisma on screen and this role seems tailor-made for her.
And if you've seen The Nice Guys, you know how hilarious Ryan Gosling can be.
I think Ryan is the only one who actually won an Oscar, but the whole team has something like double digit nominations across their projects... so if the execution is there, as it is hoped w/ Oppenheimer, these are going to the frontrunners for a boatload of awards. One has to imagine the spirit on the set was high on making such a subversive, stylized piece of filmmaking.
I was deeply skeptical that I would be interested in a movie of Barbie IP. But the opening seconds of the trailer piqued my interest, and then the title card introduced Gerwig's name. I was instantly intrigued.
I hope it's good. (Though I've got a suspicion that a lot of HN users will hate it, and not because of it's girl-coded intellectual property.)
Because of who wrote/directed and is starring in it... as silly as the subject might be on the surface (which makes it interesting because it's super against type for the creative team), chances are it will be an award circuit darling.
I couldn't care less about Barbie as a brand... don't watch Transformers movies or most superhero movies. This one? Looking forward to it. It's going to be peppered with all sorts of weird and interesting cultural critique and humor.
Barbie seems to be in that brilliantly satirical self-aware position. It plays on our expectation of what the material should be and gives it to us in a way that is simultaneously sincere and flippant.
Everyone involved seem to be able to walk that line and have the comedic skill necessary to come across as sincere in absurd situations.
As to the meme. That's just from the hilarity of this and Oppenheimer opening the same weekend. Similar openings happen all the time. Because it's a way for studios to not fight for the same dollar. At first people were laughing at the idea of Barbie crushing Oppenheimer at the box office, but that slowly morphed into the idea of just seeing both.
And since no company is never going to say no to more money, of course they got behind the idea.
As far as the "meme" of the two movies being together, I think it's the "battle of the sexes" turned on its head. Barbie looks feminine and colorful, full of fantasy, and Oppenheimer looks cold and stark, with the masculine and realist elements of wartime - watching both the movies together would be a blissful whiplash between extremes. It's produced a lot of funny content including that fake trailer that implies Barbie constructed Los Alamos and created the weapon, which made me laugh my head off. People just want to be silly and enjoy something.
It's because it's Greta Gerwig's third movie and her first two were both nominated for Best Picture. She's not quite Christopher Nolan yet, but Hollywood is aching for some semblance of the era when people cared about filmmakers and one-off projects by auteurs that were not part of a franchise could get big-time funding and a hot cast.
I’d say that’s almost giving the studios too much credit. No doubt once they saw the meme online they leaned into it, but there is genuine hype for both films, and Barbie esp. seems to be hitting the women demographic particularly strongly. I hadn’t thought of watching both the same day, but now I genuine would like to, just to say I did.
The Lego movie was awesome, and there's a good chance this brand will also put some perspective on certain childhood memories. Even down to having Will Ferrell in it.
Most people I know decide to go to the theater at the last minute. Maybe they got three interns to sign up for the double feature and this counts as a yuge spike.
Same reason Oppenheimer is: because of who is making it. Like, otherwise why would I care to see a biopic about a guy from 70-80 years ago in the theater?
Oppenheimer is a tragic figure likened to the Greek myth of Prometheus and the nuclear bomb was both the culmination of hundreds of years of physics research and deployed to commit some of the most destructive war crimes in history. Oppenheimer’s story best illustrates the whiplash of the culture of fear and the mutual distrust between the American people and its government taking hold in the years following the war.
The national lab system formed to create the bomb quickly pivoted to HPC which drove funding and research to the computing industry for decades - anyone working in the tech industry, which I’d assume describes most people on this site, really should be interested in his story.
They are rarely hits people watch a lot. They tend to be a niche interest. I think that was OP point. He is not going for biopic normally, but this one has a star in it.
