As expected, Barbie won the box office battle between these two juggernauts. It helps that Barbie is an hour shorter and is, well, Barbie. But Oppenheimer, who I now think of as Barbie’s more serious older brother, is doing just fine, raking in over a quarter of a billion dollars in the U.S. and $649M worldwide. Critically, Oppenheimer has been a little better than Barbie, with Rotten Tomatoes showing that 94% of its reviews are positive. So Christopher Nolan and Universal have done pretty great with making a summer blockbuster out of a three-hour movie that’s mostly just men sitting in rooms talking about science.
Continue reading “Barbenheimer, Part Two: Second Thoughts and the Life of “Oppenheimer””