Why Barbie Isn't the Biggest Movie Marketing Story This Week

This week every marketing publication is talking about the movie marketing for Barbie, celebrating their "dizzying array of partnerships" and all the memes, parodies and brand collabs. Many of them mention, but minimize, the importance of two significant facts:

1. Barbie is about a 60+-year-old brand that is a household name (high awareness).
2. The marketing budget was $150M (more than the film itself cost to make).

Of course, there are many ways to squander a huge marketing budget, but given the built-in advantages Barbie already had, the biggest movie marketing success story of the week has to be Oppenheimer.

For most of the weekend, the mashup hashtag #barbenheimer was trending as moviegoers unexpectedly tied the two films together and critics hailed the ensuing cultural phenomenon as nothing less than the "savior of cinema." After the weekend, all the stories about how Barbie "beat" Oppenheimer at the box office missed the real story.

In a weekend when legendary reboot movies like Mission Impossible and Indiana Jones with reliable stars like Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford were both in theaters—how did Oppenheimer manage to grab second place? Unlike the big budget crowd pleasers, Oppenheimer is a historical film with far less broad appeal, a smaller marketing budget and based on a less familiar character. It's road to success started with a bold choice to keep their release date, setting up a head on collision with the Barbie marketing machine. The team behind Oppenheimer banked on the hope that it could succeed precisely because it was so different.

What may have started as an assumption of a lack of crossover audience turned into a statement of identity for many moviegoers who declared with pride that it was simultaneously possible to choose to watch a piece of "visual candy" like Barbie alongside a "serious biopic" like Oppenheimer. Ultimately, what the biggest movie weekend in five years might prove is that people refuse to be reduced to demographics.