The 'Barbie' global ticket sales have reached $1 billion, in a historic first for women directors.
ADVERTISEMENTIn the space of just 17 days since its release, Barbie has hit the billion-dollar mark.
Greta Gerwig’s hit film has sailed past $1 billion (€910.6 million) in global ticket sales, breaking a record for female directors that was previously held by Patty Jenkins, who helmed Wonder Woman.
Barbie, which Gerwig directed and co-wrote, added another $53 million (€45.5 million) from 4,178 North American locations this weekend and $74 million (€67.4 million) internationally, bringing its global total to $1.03 billion, according to studio estimates on Sunday.
The Margot Robbie-led and produced film has been comfortably seated in first place for three weeks and it’s hardly finished yet. It crossed $400 million US domestic and $500 million internationally faster than any other movie at the studio, including the Harry Potter films.
“As distribution chiefs, we’re not often rendered speechless by a film’s performance, but Barbillion has blown even our most optimistic predictions out of the water,” said Jeff Goldstein and Andrew Cripps, who oversee domestic and international distribution for the studio, in a joint statement.
“Barbillion”.
Nice.
In modern box office history, just 53 movies have made over $1 billion, not accounting for inflation, and Barbie is now the biggest to be directed by one woman, supplanting Wonder Woman ’s $821.8 million global total.
Three movies that were co-directed by women are still ahead of Barbie, including Frozen ($1.3 billion) and Frozen 2 ($1.45 billion) both co-directed by Jennifer Lee and Captain Marvel ($1.1 billion), co-directed by Anna Boden. But, Barbie has passed Captain Marvel in the US with $459.4 million (versus $426.8 million), thereby claiming the North American record for live-action movies directed by women.
Warner Bros. co-chairs and CEOs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy also praised Gerwig in a statement and said the milestone “is testament to her brilliance and to her commitment to deliver a movie that Barbie fans of every age want to see on the big screen.”
Achieving "Barbillion" remains even more impressive, as just five other films have done so since the pandemic, including The Super Mario Brothers Movie earlier this year, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Jurassic World Dominion and the Avatar sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water.
Cinemagoers have been pairing a viewing of Barbie with Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, a double-bill known as Barbenheimer. Nolan's film also celebrated a landmark, crossing $500 million globally in three weeks. Its worldwide tally is currently $552.9 million, which puts it ahead of Dunkirk ($527 million in 2017) and has become Nolan's fifth-biggest movie ever. It's also now among the four top grossing biographies ever, alongside Bohemian Rhapsody, The Passion of the Christ and American Sniper, as well as the biggest World War II movie of all time.
Not to shabby.
And with extended theatrical rollouts, expect both Barbie and Oppenheimer to keep breaking further records in the weeks to come.
