Hollywood’s’s Barbenheimer extravaganza, bristling with industry tension, has turned into one of corporate America’s weirder public celebrations in recent memory.
The surface was all Hollywood glitz and glamor: Two very different films—Warner Bros.’ Barbie, about the feminist contradictions of an iconic doll, and Universal’s Oppenheimer, about the anguished maker of the atomic bomb—were both released July 21 and earned a combined $1.2 billion in global ticket sales over their first two weekends, generating headlines about “the movie event of the year.”
