Has Barbenheimer saved cinema? Don’t bet on it
I’ll admit it: I thought Barbie was bad and I haven’t seen Oppenheimer. Doesn’t stop me having my opinions though, does it? For some time I, as someone who’s always loved the experience of going to the cinema and seeing films on the big screen, have despaired for the future of theatrical distribution. Where I live, here in the UK, our biggest cinema chain, Cineworld (our AMC, so to speak), is in administration, as is one of its few competitors, Empire. Theatrical distribution has felt like it’s in terminal decline, with box office receipts dwindling pre-covid and decimated by a recalibration of the viewing public’s mind in the post-pandemic world. “At-home”, it seems, is now the default way of watching new releases.
But the back-to-back launches, to critical acclaim and great commercial riches, of Barbie and Oppenheimer have been heralded as a great moment. Just as it was written — over-written, as it turned out — that Top Gun: Maverick was precisely the tonic required by the beleaguered industry when it lifted-off in May 2022, so too has Barbenheimer, the portmanteau name by which the July duo have come to be known, been labelled as the saviour of cinema. “Barbenheimer is cinema’s most seismic moment in a decade,” came the verdict of Robbie Collin, one of Britain’s most respected film critics, in the Telegraph. For the first time in ages, he argues, theatrically released films are the watercooler topic du jour. Unfortunately, I am a real Eeyore and am quite sceptical about the ability of Barbenheimer to arrest the decline of the cinema. And here are some key points that I think are under-reported in our conversations about the “success” of these two films:
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