Everyone knew Barbie would be huge, ut if anything it did even better than expected. Greta Gerwig’s campy-feminist take on the longtime Mattel doll line Hoovered up an eye-popping sum, enough to narrowly break a highly coveted record.
As per The Hollywood Reporter, Barbie amassed a whopping $155 million over its opening weekend, thus making it the biggest opening ever for a female-directed motion picture. The previous holder? Captain Marvel, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, which four years ago opened to $153 million.
It’s not the only milestone Gerwig has achieved in her directing career. With 2017’s Lady Bird, she became only the fifth woman ever nominated for the Best Director Oscar. (She lost to The Shape of Water’s Guillermo del Toro.) At the time, the previous nominees we Lina Wertmüller, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, and Kathryn Bigelow. Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker, while Campion won for her second nomination, for The Power of the Dog.
Having the biggest weekend for a film directed by a woman isn’t the only record Barbie nabbed this weekend. It also had the highest opening day gross of the year thus far, with $70 million.
Of course, not everyone is happy with Barbie. The far right have found themselves triggered by the very pink picture, among them Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, and Matt Gaetz’s wife.
Barbie’s record breaking opening was nearly twice that of Oppenheimer, its partner in crime, but its $80.5 million gross is nothing to sneeze at, especially for a three-hour, R-rated downer about the inventor of the most dangerous weapon ever created.
So congrats to Greta Gerwig, who found a very outside-the-box way to follow up her prized adaptation of Little Women.
(Via THR)