The sums of money involved in making and selling films are so colossal that it’s often hard to see beyond them to the value of the movies themselves. It was no surprise to find the odd couple of last summer making the headlines for both the Bafta and Oscar shortlists – Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer for meeting expectations with multiple nominations and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie for disappointing them, even though it is ahead at the box office.
Few who witnessed the excitable swirls of pink outside cinemas, or have dwelt on the fortuitous weirdness of a movie about a Mattel doll being fused into a double header with a biopic of a nuclear physicist, could grudge their success at a time when cinemas all over the country were on their knees in the aftermath of the pandemic. Opinions may differ about their merits, but they have brought people out and been widely discussed.
