Will Barbie Make a Billion Dollars at the Box Office?

Earlier this year, looking at the roaring success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, I wondered if it would be the only billion-dollar hit of 2023--on account of no live-action film seeming likely to do such business.

Of course, at the time I was mainly thinking about the usual blockbusters--superhero films and such, with this validated for the most part. (Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and much more, The Flash, certainly disappointed that way--as has Indiana Jones, while Fast X and the latest Transformers film did not exceed the low expectations held for them.)

Barbie was not really on my radar. I knew the movie was coming, but was unsure of what to make of it as a box office prospect. (Greta Gerwig has up to now been a maker of small critics' darling films rather than big blockbusters, the little I knew about the movie suggested something far outside the mold of the usual summer blockbuster, I was not sure how well it would travel internationally, etc..) A hit it might be, but a $1 billion+ hit in 2023? I had seen nothing to indicate that, and I suppose neither did anyone else going by the way Boxoffice Pro's tracking shifted very late in the game.

The publication's first projection had Barbie making just $55-$85 million in its opening weekend and topping out in the vicinity of $225 million at best when all was said and done--far from the makings of a billion dollar hit. It was only later, with the figure surging from week to week that they came to anticipate twice their original projection just before its release.

Moreover, their heightened expectation proved correct, with the film pulling in $162 million in its first three days. Assuming a typical front-loaded blockbuster profile one would expect that to account for 40 percent of the total, suggesting a final gross in the $400 million range, though there now seem expectations of much more--not least because, thanks to an excellent second weekend hold for such a big movie (the second Friday-to-Sunday period gross falling a mere 43 percent from that of the first weekend), it has already blasted past the $350 million mark in its first ten days.

Meanwhile the film has had a strong response overseas, taking in at least half its money there, raising the global total to the vicinity of $750 million--again, just ten days on. Should this pattern continue as the film approaches the half billion dollar mark in North America then the movie can be expected to cross the $1 billion mark, and fairly soon, on the way to some point well past that. The result is that in a few weeks 2023 may well have had a billion-dollar live-action Hollywood hit--just not from among the usual suspects.

* The two movies in question were Dr. Strange 2 and Black Panther 2.