Barbie just beat a Dark Knight box office record
If you think Barbie had a great opening weekend, just wait until you hear about her Monday
Much like Taylor Swift, Barbie is beginning to break records you’ve never even thought about before. Best opening weekend of 2023? Absolutely. Fourth-best opening of all time? Sure, pretty impressive. Warner Bros. best Monday ever? Okay, now things are getting a little esoteric. But this is Barbie-mania, baby, and we’re gonna be riding this train until the wheels fall off. (Literally: if studios start delaying more films in the wake of the SAG-AFTRA strike, this may be as good as it gets movie-wise for the rest of the year.)
To make this box office record a little spicier, Barbie has now defeated a Christopher Nolan film on two fronts. First in the straightforward battle of Barbie vs. Oppenheimer, which famously opened on the same day. (Oppenheimer isn’t doing too bad for itself, though.) Second, in the kinda-sorta made up battle for Warner Bros. Best Monday Ever, the title for which previously belonged to Nolan’s The Dark Knight, according to Deadline.
Moviegoers everywhere staved off a bad case of the Mondays by delighting in Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling’s performances as Barbie and Ken in Greta Gerwig’s biggest movie yet. Perhaps even more impressive than having Warner Bros. top Monday, Barbie achieved the best Monday of 2023. That’s ahead of The Little Mermaid, which had the benefit of coming out on Memorial Day weekend when many in the United States had Monday off. Delving back into ultra-specific territory, Deadline reports that “Among all Mondays in July,” Barbie comes second only to 2005’s Spider-Man 2.
Meanwhile, Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s third-biggest opening ever, after The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises (per Rotten Tomatoes). As it happens, it is also his third-biggest Monday ever, behind those same two movies. And to add another esoteric achievement to Oppenheimer’s list, it’s the seventh biggest opening ever for a film 165 minutes or longer, according to Rotten Tomatoes. (The top three are Avengers: Endgame, Avatar: The Way Of Water, and The Batman.)
Both Barbie and Oppenheimer are sure to rack up some random-ass records as their theatrical runs continue. Combined, the two films have reportedly made over $235.5 million and counting.