This year's summer box office was in trouble until last month. Before July, every big-name, big-budget movie coming to theaters was a flop, no matter how highly anticipated or highly rated. Movies that everyone was excited to see, like DC's The Flash, lost hundreds of millions of dollars, so did Pixar's Elemental, and Disney's Indiana Jones and Dial of Destiny didn't do anything better.
Some, like Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, did well enough, not failures but not breaking any records either, and some could barely scrape past breaking even, like Fast X. All these movies from celebrated studios and iconic franchises were either costly fiascos or forgettable incidents. That's only counting the summer flops, too.
Then came Jim Caviezel's controversial true-story thriller Sound of Freedom on American Independence Day, a crowdfunded indie film by an unknown studio with a paltry budget that came smashing through the box office wreckage to earn over ten times its budget with very little marketing beforehand, becoming famous purely by word of mouth.
Soon after came Greta Gerwig's hot pink fever dream Barbie, based on her favorite childhood toy, and Christopher Nolan's drearily dark drama Oppenheimer, about the man "who became Death," both had the same release date and have since merged into one big internet sensation.
It's no understatement to say these three movies saved the whole year's box office, and theaters have struggled to gain the same kind of audiences since the COVID pandemic. So if studios want to emulate the success of these films, there are a lot of notes to take. Here's what Hollywood can learn from the success of Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Sound of Freedom.
Marketing Can Make Anyone Excited
In a very rare event, Universal and Warner Brothers both dropped a bomb on the box office – one hot pink, the other black and white – and both hit their target audiences and then some.
Because both Barbie and Oppenheimer had the same release date and were so contrasting in tone, themes, and everything, the two were amalgamated into the now-famous online phenomenon "Barbenheimer," filling the internet with a whole host of hilarious Barbenheimer memes for months before release.
The two became a double feature. Many moviegoers went to see both because of a simple ship name that created a chemistry most celebrities can't manage. Fans were creating marketing for themselves, with plenty of photos and videos featuring the two in crazy, creative ways that The New York Times stated that "Barbenheimer memes is an art form all their own."
This doesn't mean Hollywood should pair every release with a contrasting counterpart. Paramount has tried that, mashing the horror Saw X with the kiddy Paw Patrol into "Saw Patrol," and people can tell it's forced and unoriginal and a marketing fail. Hollywood needs to invest in original, inspiring marketing that can make adult men want to see a doll movie.
No Need for CGI Spectacles
Hollywood has been stuffed with big CGI spectacles ever since Marvel's MCU started fifteen years ago, filling every theater with super-powered CGI showdowns every other month. As fun as they are, they can be pretty mind-numbing after a decade and a half, and even worse is that such big-budget flicks have cramped lower-budget films out of theaters. If you went into a theater during the last decade, all the posters were always advertising another Marvel or Star Wars movie, and every other one was another CGI extravaganza.
Both Barbie and Oppenheimer didn't rely on CGI to be made, as both Gerwig and Nolan preferred to use old movie-making tricks to create their films. Barbie used strings and diorama for the traveling scenes and built almost every single pink building in Barbieland. Oppenheimer used a real bomb for the big atomic test, getting close up to make it appear bigger. All these tricks saved the budget and the eyes of audiences, as the films looked as good and real as possible.
Indie Films Still Have a Place in the Box Office
While it was overtaken by the Barbenheimer tag team, Sound of Freedom is a highly unusual event, where a film with a meager budget of $14.5 million and no pre-release publicity has made over $150 million before it has even gone global.
While it's considered controversial, Sound of Freedom won in the wake of a dozen failures. An excellent film with a good real-life message that serves as a call to action for all, to help the most innocent and defenseless, the movie saw plenty of success.
Sound of Freedom is indie in every single way, with a tiny budget to work with, no marketing whatsoever, no franchise to attach to, and no recognizable names in the production. And yet, it became a massive hit, showing that there's still a place for indie movies with new ideas and new creators.
Audiences Want Originality
The big lesson that all three can teach Hollywood at large is that audiences want originality. Every one of those films that failed before the big three was attached to a big franchise, touting itself as the latest installment in decades-old stories, but not one could hit the mark.
Meanwhile, the ones not connected to a franchise hit way above the mark, with Barbie joining the billion-dollar-club, Oppenheimer at over half a billion, and while Sound of Freedom has made a fraction of that, it still made over ten times the profit more than the cost, an incredibly rare achievement.
Audiences are stating, in no uncertain terms, that sequels, reboots, and connected universes are not going to save theaters. We want risky projects based on compelling ideas that challenge filmmakers and audiences.
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August 13, 2023 at 10:30PM
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What Hollywood Can Learn From Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Sound of Freedom - MovieWeb
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