Barbie continued to rule the box office charts with a $79 million worldwide fourth weekend, while climbing the all-time charts with a $1.18 billion gross and counting. All signs point to Barbie continuing to play strong, but in the race for the 2023 box office crown, Barbie vs The Super Mario Bros. Movie is looking a lot closer than expected.
Margot Robbie stars in « Barbie »
The final distance between Barbie and Super Mario Bros. is going to come down to a few tens of million at most. With receipts from this week and the coming weekend, Barbie should post $75-80 million in new ticket sales and raise its global cume north of $1.26 billion. And at this point in the race to the top of the charts, every million will count.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie grossed $1.356 billion, so after this weekend Barbie will only trail the video game adaptation by less than $100 million. But with the back half of August, the marketplace begins to be more challenging and Barbie might start to see larger weekly declines in the face of combined obstacles.
Blue Beetle, Gran Turismo, and Strays will pull some of the family audience away, and the first two of those will attract much of the teen audience. Golda and The Equalizer 3 will draw some of the adult women audience, while The Hill attracts some of the adult male audience. None alone is a major competitor for Barbie, but the totality of their effect will be a steady drain on key audience demographics and could slow the film enough to leave it shy of the 2023 box office crown.
And that’s just through the end of August. September starts right off with yet another competitor for one of Barbie’s primary demographics, when My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 hits theaters. If you’re keeping track, that’s three movies targeted squarely at women audiences and three targeted at younger audience members and families, across the next four weeks.
The end of September is a more mixed bag, with The Expendables 4 unlikely to do more than disappoint like the last chapter, but Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie sure to take a bite out of Barbie’s younger viewership.
Meanwhile, The Creator looks like it should be a big blockbuster sci-fi action movie with emotionally compelling and resonant themes, but it’s a Disney live-action release and that’s not a successful category this year, so there’s an inherent question mark on this one.
It’s worth taking a moment to look closer at the point about The Creator being a film that seems like a sure thing but which could still fall prey to the same factors hamstringing much of the 2023 box office so far (despite much of the entertainment press carry water for studios and theaters by downplaying or mischaracterizing the real situation and warning signs). So let’s consider a similarly situated film from a few months ago…
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One had every reason to be one of the year’s biggest hits, from pedigree to quality to relevant AI themes and incredible action sequences full of eye-popping visual effects and stunts, yet the film will finish its box office run with around $550 million in worldwide receipts. Instead of the expected “biggest film of the franchise” and a contender for top release of 2023, M:I – Dead Reckoning is going to wind up smack dab in the middle as the third- or fourth-lowest/highest grossing movie in the 27-year seven-film franchise history.
The same fate awaited Fast X, this year’s 10th chapter in the Fast & Furious saga. While still a blockbuster performer at $719 million, it’s the lowest grossing entry in the franchise since 2011’s Fast Five, and the fourth chapter in a row to experience declining returns.
Which is all to say for the umpteenth time, doing things the usual way with the usual IP and usual faces isn’t enough to convince audiences to show up anymore. At least, not at the levels they used to. And that means a lot of what we think of as typical “sure things” and likely blockbusters will wind up underperforming or outright flopping, sometimes when they deserve to and other times when they don’t.
In the event, Barbie needs to hope more films disappoint so it can continue holding better than 50% and have enough momentum to seize this year’s title of box office champ from The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Ideally, Barbie would have at least a couple of additional weeks where it managed declines lower than 45%.
Again, Barbie still has incredible holds for being four weekends deep into its run, and there are plenty of signs it won’t slow much for a while. So this isn’t to suggest Barbie is “struggling” or is unlikely to win the race against Super Mario Bros. But it’s also true that, at the current rate and in the face of upcoming new movies arriving in theaters, Barbie’s trajectory to the year’s top box office spot is starting to look less certain. I’m still betting on Barbie to pull out the win, but it will be a close one.
Be sure to check back here again soon, dear readers, and I’ll have more updates and reviews for you as the summer movie season plays out.
