Source: Vanity Fair
It's one thing to look like a million bucks, and it's another to make a billion. On Sunday, August 6, Greta Gergwig's Barbie officially surpassed $1 billion at the global box office. That's a whole lotta dream houses.
Barbie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, previously became the biggest blockbuster of the summer on Wednesday, when it surpassed Chris Pratt's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3's $845 million global haul; Gerwig's film entered the weekend with $880 million in its plastic purse. And even before she walked her pink pumps past the billion-dollar mark, Barbie had already made Greta Gerwig the highest-grossing female director of all time, besting Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman (2017), which made $822.8 million at the global box office.
Barbie's ticket sales were, of course, boosted by the “Barbenheimer” craze, which saw cinephiles flocking the cinemas for a double feature of Barbie and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, about the invention of the atomic bomb. The frenzy led to Barbie making $356 million in its opening weekend—the largest opening for a female director of all time.
Robbie, for one, was confident Barbie would make a billion dollars well before Barbie became the smash hit of the summer. Robbie, who also serves as an executive producer on the film with her production company LuckyChap, had to do her fair share of convincing producers to rescue Barbie from over ten years of developmental hell. In an interview with Collider, Robbie said during her pitch meeting she hammered home how successful films like Jurassic Park were that paired “a big idea with a visionary director” a la “dinosaurs and [Steven] Spielberg.”
“I was like, “And now you’ve got Barbie and Greta Gerwig,” she said. ”And I think I told them that it’d make a billion dollars, which maybe I was overselling, but we had a movie to make, okay?!"
Turns out she was underselling. With all this money, it looks like Ken can retire from his job at “the beach.”
