The “Barbenheimer” celebration, following the rare decision to release two tentpole movies on the same weekend, was shown to be more than just talk when both Barbie and Oppenheimer had very strong openings at the box office. The success of both movies has continued as both films are currently in the top ten films domestically for 2023. Unfortunately, now the whole Barbenheimer thing has been hit with some negative backlash that has resulted in Warner Bros. making very negative public comments about… itself.
As part of the Barbenheimer celebration on social media, we saw a lot of posts, memes, and fan-created art, that brought Margot Robbie’s Barbie together with Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer. The two films are distributed by different studios. Oppenheimer came from Universal, while Barbie came from Christopher Nolan's former studio WB. But the official Barbie Twitter account got in on the action, responding to some of the Barbenheimer images. However, this did not sit well with Warner Bros.’ Japanese arm.
