The stakes are always high in the summer movie season.
But even in a schedule that has heavyweights like Indiana Jones, Ariel, Ethan Hunt and Dominic Toretto vying for box office supremacy, the biggest, funniest showdown is happening on July 21. On that fateful Friday, cinephiles will be faced with a difficult choice: Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” or Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie”?
The “Barbieheimer” showdown is, naturally, a bit silly. First, it’s entirely possible to see two new movies in one weekend. Second, while opening weekends are important, they’re also not everything. In 2008, “The Dark Knight” debuted on the same weekend as “Mamma Mia!” and both went on to be major successes.
But it has inspired the kind of feverish, half-serious, half-joking discourse online that no marketing can buy, with memes, jokes, bets and Highlander references galore every time either film drops a new advertisement. There were even a few hours in April when the internet panicked that the beach-off was canceled. (It wasn’t.) And before you go googling, the Highlander jokes are not about that film’s disastrous 1986 box office run, but instead the enduring “there can only be one” line.
The summer movie season always begins before actual summer. This year, it kicks off today with the release of Disney and Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and runs through Labor Day.