Oppenheimer vs Barbie, now there’s a battle you would never think could take place, but at the end of July, that’s exactly what is going to happen.
Every now and then in Hollywood, they release really big movies on the same weekend. Die Hard and A Fish Called Wanda opened the same weekend in 1988. Batman and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids did the same. Ghostbusters and Gremlins duked it out over the same opening weekend. These movies weren’t exactly opposites of each other. On 21st July, Oppenheimer will open on the same weekend as Barbie and you couldn’t have two movies more different.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer deals with the drama of the man who invented the atomic bomb. He changed the course of history. Based on a book called American Prometheus, it looks like a deep movie exploring man’s moral question about enabling the destruction of his own race.
Barbie has Margot Robbie running around in a pink outfit and in a pink car and features other people saying they will “beach” each other off. Talk about opposite ends of the spectrum. Can you imagine the conversation of a couple who have seen one of the movies, chatting with a couple who have seen the other?
Each movie is a palate cleanser for the other. If you are going to have a deep and meaningful existential crisis watching the creation of the atomic bomb, watching Barbie afterwards will bring you back down to earth and help you realise that dropping a bomb is a good thing.
If you are looking forward to watching Barbie, even ironically, watching Oppenheimer afterwards will make you feel intelligent and have something interesting to discuss with the other airheads at work on Monday.
In July, which one are you going to see?
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