What Made Barbie A Blockbuster
Variety, 2023
Seeing the picture of Margot Robbie and Cillian Murphy together in the “Actors on Actors” interview and photoshoot, we can’t but think about the Oscars, as our minds directly bring us back to the summer of 2023, when “Barbenheimer” took place. However, overall, there was a clear winner in the race: Barbie by Greta Gerwig, and not just as a final result regarding the total amount of money it generated compared to Oppenheimer, which was still a record-breaking movie, but how the whole concept and idea was created. In the summer of 2023, Barbie took over. The film was everywhere. But Barbie isn’t the first movie to do a massive summer takeover: it was actually the movie Jaws. As Alissa Wilkinson, the senior correspondent and critic at Voxdotcom states, “Jaws basically invented the modern blockbuster. Before Jaws, no movie had made 100 million dollars at the box office. This didn’t happen by accident. It was all a strategy that started long before Jaws, the movie”. There were 3 main points in the popularity that Jaws generated.
Getty Images, 1973
Use of Intellectual Property
The producers at Universal acquired the film rights to Jaws before Peter Benchley had even published the book. They started pouring money into marketing it. They placed the book in book clubs, named it book of the month, and beaches were emblazoned with the words “Read Jaws”. Hype was built up and it was perhaps inevitable that Jaws, the novel, would become a blockbuster in its own right. It topped the bestseller lists for 44 weeks.
Market Saturation
Then, in 1975, just a year after the book was published, the film came out, and it was good; a giant shark, beautiful cinematography, and an innovative score that kept the audience on the edge of their seats. Wilkinson in fact says that “When the studio showed it to test audiences, they realized they had a massive hit on their hands. And so, they started sinking money early into marketing”. This money was spent on newspaper, radio, and especially on television advertising. In the days leading up to opening weekend, they flooded the market, buying 30-second spots on every prime-time television program on all the major networks in the US (CBS, NBC, ABC). Time magazine even featured Jaws on its cover, and for a while it seemed like there was no escaping the film. It created a situation where it was an event you didn’t want to miss out on.
The Daily Jaws, 2019
Wide Release
Many movies at the time would firstly release their movies in a couple of cinemas, and then slowly start showing them in more and more. Jaws didn’t apply that strategy. The film was released in 409 theaters in the US and 55 more in Canada on June 20, 1975, in the middle of summer, which makes sense because Jaws was about warm weather and beaches. Back then, however, big movies didn’t often hit theaters in the summer. Wilkinson justifies this by saying “Why would summer be a good time? You want to be outside, and this is sort of pre-air-conditioning for a lot of people, so maybe it’s very uncomfortable”. All these factors, the promotion of the book, the intense publicity for the film, the timing - all these factors led to Jaws becoming the highest-grossing film of all time, passing the 100-million-dollar mark just 61 days after its release. A lot has changed between "Jaws" and "Barbie", but if you look at the underlying blockbuster strategy, they are almost identical:
Both utilize pre-existing intellectual property (although Barbie is much bigger than Jaws, since it is a decades-old toy, with decades-old advertising)
They were both released in the summer on all kinds of screens
They both took market saturation to the extreme
But what sets Barbie apart from all the other blockbusters is that it’s had a much harder time catching on. Wilkinson says that the cause of this is that “There has always been the perception among the predominantly male executives of Hollywood that women will go see a movie starring a man, but men won’t go see movies starring women. And whether or not that’s a cultural product of just not having movies starring women, is a big question. So, making Barbie is obviously a gamble”. To minimize this risk, the Barbie team had to be strategic.
Greta Gerwig on the set of “Barbie” with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Credit: Jaap Buitendijk
THE BARBIE STRATEGY
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The first step was to broaden the idea of what a Barbie movie could be. They decided to go with the director Greta Gerwig. They chose someone with a defined style and idea of what stories she wants to tell. Gerwig has generally made smaller, thoughtful films about the human condition, making her an unconventional choice for a film of this scale. She conveyed the message that Hollywood wouldn’t just make a Barbie movie to raise money. The movie would be more sophisticated and subversive than you might expect. Take a look at the first trailer, for example. It references the scene from “2001: A Space Odyssey”," a 1968 movie that’s three hours long and literally deals with all of human life, which is very cool…. but it’s also very niche. This trailer was also released before “Avatar: The Way of Water”, a blockbuster that was going to be a big hit, which means you could get maximum exposure. But this is not a typical pairing. For example, horror movies are usually preceded by horror trailers. Placing Barbie before Avatar was a clear signal that they were trying to reach an audience that wasn’t immediately excited about Barbie.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Anyone Can Be Barbie
The movie and marketing took an approach of portraying diverse types of people and making it possible for anyone to become Barbie. Either with the help of the selfie generator or making a barbie figure of yourself, or stand in the pink box that were present in various shops and malls around the world where you could take a picture of yourself, or, thanks to Airbnb, you can live in Barbie’s dream house. There were even shows where interior designers would re-make your house in a Barbie style. You could live the Barbie lifestyle in the real world. This isn't possible with other blockbusters.
Pink
As Wilkinson states, “It’s pink. It’s just pink” Pantone C 219 to be exact. So, you could walk around in pink clothing, and it was automatically a Barbie thing. Or there’s a café that popped up, that was the Barbie café. It just needed pink. You can’t overestimate the power of simplicity when linking to a brand. For example, if you want a Barbie burger, give it some pink slime and you've got brand loyalty. Barbie clothes? Just make them pink; easy. According to Josh Goldstein, Warner Brothers' head of marketing, the whole thing was no longer a marketing campaign, it became a movement. They didn’t have to appeal to every brand because every brand wanted a piece of the Barbie apple.
FOREIGN POLICY ILLUSTRATION/WARNER BROS AND UNIVERSAL PHOTOS
Fun
Did the time of Barbenheimer arrive? Oh yes it did. As Wilkinson explains perfectly, “Barbenheimer jokes started where it was like: Isn’t it just funny that these two are coming out on the same day? And it is; one is dark, the other one is pink. And then people thought: Well, wouldn’t it be funnier if you went and saw both movies on the same day? And the results of this, I think, is that Barbie got a boost because men who might have felt weird about just buying a ticket for a Barbie movie, now they’re going to see it as part of a double feature, so it’s kind of a bit. And Oppenheimer definitely got a boost from the same”. The marketing was a mix of strategy, luck and a series of connections, and it paid off. Barbie grossed 162 million dollars, almost double that of Oppenheimer. As Wilkinson puts it, “The box office for Barbie was definitely surprising. They expected it to make a lot of money, they just didn’t expect it to make that much money, that fast in the theater”. Barbie has passed the billion-dollar mark at the box office in just 17 days. Only 53 films have managed that so far. And Barbie is the only film to have been directed exclusively by a woman. According to Variety, the Barbie marketing team spent an estimated 150 million dollars on marketing the film, while the production budget was 145 million dollars. That means they spent more money marketing the movie than making it. This is not unusual, but pouring money into marketing doesn’t always work. Maybe it helps the opening weekend, but it's often harder to keep the momentum going.
“One thing that’s really unique about Barbie for 2023, anyhow, is that people are going back to see it multiple times. And I think it’s because it’s sort of a unique film in the blockbuster world in that it’s kind of subversive, it’s got a little bit of everything for a cinephile, but it’s also very warm and very warm-hearted, like it’s not a bummer of a movie and it’s funny” (Wilkinson, 2023).
To reach 1 billion, you need both: a good movie and a great marketing campaign. In 2023, the year of Barbie, Warner Brothers has managed to combine the two.
