"Barbenheimer" Wins at the Box Office, How Did "Barbenheimer" Do It?, Apple and Messi
Hello everyone.
Over the weekend, Neil went through Tesla’s earnings and Q&A. In breaking everything down there were two themes that jumped out at him. We will get to that tomorrow.
For today, we will kick things off with movies. There is a lot to be said about what happened at the box office over the weekend with “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” Many people are assessing what the movies will do to the media space including decisions around IP, streaming, and movie theaters. The email concludes with Neil’s thoughts on Apple playing a role in Lionel Messi signing with MLS.
“Barbenheimer" Wins at the Box Office
“The movie business lives!
Greta Gerwig’s gender wars ‘Barbie’ and Christopher Nolan’s nuclear war ‘Oppenheimer’ blew past already-stratospheric prelease expectations at the weekend box office to collect a combined $235.5 million in the United States and Canada, an astounding total that sent a clear message to Hollywood: If you want to commandeer the culture, you must give moviegoers something new — not just the same old threadbare franchises…
‘Barbie’ arrived as a full-blown cultural event, with thousands of moviegoers draping themselves in pink for screenings, doll memes flooding social media and marketers scrambling (sometimes awkwardly) to glom onto the moment. The audience was 65 percent female. ‘For a film this pink, you would have expected the audience to be closer to 90 percent female — we got a ton of guys,’ said Jeff Goldstein, president of domestic distribution at Warner Bros. ‘It exploded everywhere: large markets, small markets, coast to coast.'"
There have been varied takes this morning from analysts, industry folk, and pundits.
One quote from Paul Dergarabedian, a senior Comscore analyst, caught my attention. He positioned movie theaters as being the big winners from this past weekend, saying "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" "solidified the movie theater as a culture hub and epicenter of social interaction.” Not surprisingly, movie theater operators said versions of that.
Others viewed the movies as one-off events that benefited from fresh IP, huge marketing budgets, and difficult to replicate societal buzz that took months to build.
If choosing between those two camps,
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