Some defect in the homo sapiens brain compels us to see everything in terms of competition – all the world grouped by trials of skill and supremacy into a binary of winners and losers. This is of course how we wound up with the concept of sport – and, probably, war – but the internet’s never-ending ticker of discourse is applying this mindset to the arts with increasing frequency, creative expression simplified into a horse race that lets fans prognosticate and claim bragging rights. During the heydays of Game of Thrones and Succession, viewers readjusted their power rankings week by week in an attempt to predict the plotlines’ ultimate victors. In the streets, snapping gangs of Swifties rumble with squadrons of the BTS army. In the replies of any tweet announcing some significant pop-cultural happening, whether it be a greenlit sequel or news of another studio album, it’s not uncommon to see triumphant diehards crowing en masse, “WE WON.”
Over the past few months, this pathology has reached a fever pitch in the lead-up to an epochal box-office showdown slated for this coming Friday. In the red corner, weighing in at seven-and-a-quarter ounces, it’s the foot-tall wrecking ball, Greta Gerwig’s high-fructose feat of pop artistry, Barbie. And in the blue corner, he has become death, destroyer of worlds and possibly per-theater gross records, the bomb-daddy himself, Christopher Nolan’s stolid second world war period piece, Oppenheimer. Can he unleash the firepower to reduce the iconic plaything to an ashen crater? Or will this tenacious little hunk of plastic have what it takes to withstand waves of atomic radiation? Plenty of fence-sitters have withheld their allegiance by booking a double feature, but the impending cineplex Götterdämmerung still speaks to something fundamental about how and why we pit movies against one another.
It happens every year around Oscar time, once the field of best picture nominees has been winnowed down to two frontrunners: inevitably, one candidate comes to stand in for rarefied and mature tastes geared toward a higher-brow excellence, the other a populist favorite giving the people the lighter-hearted enjoyment they so crave, each duel becoming a referendum on the eternal clash between art and entertainment. This dichotomy is pretty obviously false; based on Gerwig’s thoughtful interviews, there’s plenty of ideological meat on the bone of Barbie, and I defy any reasonable person to keep a straight face at Matt Damon’s overseer general sputtering that “This is the most important thing to ever happen in the history of the world!” in the Oppenheimer trailer. Even so, the ad campaigns underscore the gap in tone and suggest an industry serving two distinct and discrete markets, titans coexisting by claiming separate domains. (Unless, that is, there’s something to the murmurs of Nolan’s former studio Warner Bros keeping Barbie scheduled for his big day out of sheer stubbornness.)
In the past, when blockbuster rivals have squared off in a shared weekend instead of one clearing a path for the other, they have occupied lanes of taste that intersect minimally enough to leave room for both. Said rivalry, then, is mostly projected by the public on to two players in different games. Consider the pairing of 31 March 1999, which pitted The Matrix (for the fellas) against 10 Things I Hate About You (for the ladies). On 15 July 1988 both Die Hard and A Fish Called Wanda set out on the path to $100m grosses, action and comedy occupying their own territories. On 22 November 1995, Martin Scorsese’s Nevada crime epic Casino and Pixar’s first feature Toy Story offered audiences a choice between grownup maturity and kiddie stuff. Both generated handsome returns, but Woody and Buzz claimed the brass ring by a margin in the hundreds of millions, a reliable predictor for the dollars-and-cents outcomes in many such future cases. A few weeks later, Jumanji likewise edged out Heat, another violent saga from an esteemed director and some of Hollywood’s pre-eminent heavyweight actors. In instances of family-friendly fare going up against an R rating, the former almost always comes out on top; betting types among us can rest assured that Barbie’s dominance is all but a foregone conclusion.
The closest to a proper matchup between comparable combatants would be Blade Runner v The Thing (25 June 1982) or Ghostbusters v Gremlins (8 June 1984), wherein neither genre nor age demographic pose a complicating factor. That these titles all found their quotient of success supplies a reminder that there’s a lot of money to go around in show business and that moviegoers can find it within themselves to like more than one thing at a time. The climactic clash termed “Barbenheimer” by people unaware of how pleasing “Oppenheimie” is to say out loud most closely evokes a toe-to-toe reckoning from a different sector of the arts, the 2007 face-off between Curtis and Graduation, the respective third albums by 50 Cent and Kanye West. Fiddy raised the stakes by vowing that he would retire from the rap game if outsold, and gave hip-hop heads in the aughts their Thrilla in Manila.
In the end, everyone won – both moved upwards of 600,000 copies in their opening week, the first time two musical releases did so in over a decade and a half, and a bested 50 Cent went on to drop two more albums anyway. The enmity was only ever a game, part put-on designed to boost excitement in the consumer base, part grassroots pastime from people filling hours of the day. In the peaceful eye at the center of a storm of PR counter-narratives, it’s all in good fun.
