It is, as portmanteaus go, not especially satisfying. Barbenheimer? Bar. Ben. Hi. Mur? Rhythmically, we are here on a par with an out-of-tune piano tumbling down a staircase of whoopee cushions. Or a line of exposition from Tenet. But as an unwitting marketing strategy? Genius. Total and utter genius. Traditionally when there has been a day-of-release chart battle — Blur versus Oasis, say — you have two highly motivated, obsessive fan bases going out and basically buying what they would buy anyway: the only sales bump coming via the tiny, crazy percentage of multiple copy/ticket buyers present on each side.
Thanks to an uncharacteristically nice social media trend, the summer’s two competing biggest movies have harnessed the additional power of... each other’s highly motivated, obsessive fan bases. And you can bet that right now, Hollywood is pooing its quarterly- sales-target-dependant bonus-pants at the possibilities. ‘Forget Batman v Superman! Now we can just put out Batman and Superman on the same day! We’ll get the kids to call it, um... Bat-man?’
Going forward, though, studios should be cognisant of something. Namely that, while Barbie and Oppenheimer may on the surface seem like chalk and cheese, they are in truth — to utilise a movie villain to movie hero clicheÌ — not so different after all. And it is this that has made them work so well together.
Both are the work of think-they’re-clever directors who make films for people who think they’re clever. In one corner you have Greta Gerwig who, with her partner, Noah Baumbach, writes almost exclusively in tweets and will-never-actually-be T-shirt slogans (see: ‘My job is... just beach’). In the other you have Christopher Nolan, a man whose plots are so incomprehensible that he normally has to hire Michael Caine to Caine-splain them calmly for dummies in the first 10 minutes (side note: I am actually really excited for Oppenheimer because I like the Nolan films — Dunkirk, the three Batmans — where he is hemmed in by an existing mythology/plot and doesn’t have to invent one for me not to understand himself).
The only loser in all this is poor Tom Cruise, who must be kicking himself that he didn’t cease wingeing about who gets the Imax theatres, shunt Dead Reckoning forward a week and take part in a Barbenmissionimpossibleheimer love in. You can bet he’ll be eyeing the opening box office figures of both with envy while wondering who he can team up with come the sequel. I predict stories of behind-the-scenes tantrums about who gets the lion’s share of the letters in whichever portmanteau is next.
It’s wonderful, really. Having been on a one-man crusade — a Cruiseade, if you will — to save cinema via must-be-seen-on-a-big-screen action sequences, the ultimate movie star has been out-savioured by a pair of introverted auteurs lent a hand by us, the great ticket buying public, coming together for a rare moment of togetherness. It’s almost a movie plot in and of itself. Now we just need to get it made, and then figure out which film it can be teamed up with.
