It was a pink mushroom cloud that even enveloped the White House. “Did you see Barbie or Oppenheimer this weekend?” a reporter asked the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. She replied: “I knew I was going to get that question. I did not. But heard that it did very well.”
Both films did very well: Barbie collected $162m in ticket sales while Oppenheimer, about the father of the atom bomb, earned $82.4m. It was comfortably the best weekend at the domestic box office since the coronavirus pandemic. But when future historians come to study the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, they may still have a question: was this the dawn of a Hollywood renaissance or glorious last stand of an industry in decline?
Even with the weekend’s sugar rush, the box office is still down 20% from pre-pandemic levels. Actors and writers are on strike simultaneously for the first time in more than 60 years. Online streaming services and artificial intelligence, or AI, are upending the business model and exposing the wealth gap between studio bosses and anyone who is not a household name.
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