Barbenheimer: Culture Craze

Moviegoers across the globe assembled over the weekend to celebrate both Greta Gerwig’s pink and plastic-permeated Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s atomic history epic Oppenheimer.

With both films opening on the same day, many ticket buyers picked up same-day viewings of the films — Tarantino among them.

In a photograph posted to Twitter, a user snapped a picture of the filmmaker in Los Angeles with Roger Avary, his “Pulp Fiction” co-writer and co-host on the pair’s Video Archives Podcast. The caption shared that Tarantino walked across the street after seeing “Oppenheimer” to buy tickets for “Barbie,” going from the Westwood Village to the Regency Bruin Theatre.

Tarantino and Bruin Theater

The social media presence of the Video Archives podcast affirmed the description: “Yes our boys were out last night doing what they love to do the most together, seeing movies.”

Although Tarantino has no official social media presence, Avary was happy to sing praises for their “Barbie”-going experience on Twitter: “The Barbie showing in Westwood last night had such an amazing audience, literally cheering the movie. Many of them were larping. I haven’t seen that in a while, and it was awesome.”

The phenom deemed “Barbeheimer” stirred up a box office craze, with both films fueling the fourth-biggest overall weekend in history.

“This is an unequivocally great weekend for moviegoing,” says David A. Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research. “‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ are complementing each other at the box office, not taking audience from each other.”