Film / Box Office
Box Office Chart: July 21-23 2023
1. Barbie £18,509,236 (new release)
2. Oppenheimer £10,891,486 (new release)
3. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One £2,891,486 (£16,408,111, 2 weeks)
4. Elemental £1,430,063 (£8,960,702, 3 weeks)
5. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny £677,203 (£17,999,463, 4 weeks)
6. Insidious: The Red Door £535,268 (£6,537,978, 3 weeks)
7. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse £266,020 (29,514,961, 8 weeks)
8. The Little Mermaid £113,019 (£26,819,908, 9 weeks)
9. Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken £86,003 (£2,092,249, 4 weeks)
10. The Super Mario Bros. Movie £75,935 (£54,019,405, 16 weeks)
Chart copyright Comscore
In a triumph of pink-hued marketing, the most hyped movie of 2023 became the biggest UK box opener of the year as Barbie grabbed more than £18m over the weekend. For months, film hacks’ inboxes have been filled with opportunistic PR crap (Genuine recent examples: ‘Brits Go Barbie Mad – Sparking Pink Home Makeover Trend’, ‘Barbie’s Corvette vs Jeep: Experts Reveal Which of Barbie’s Iconic Cars Is the Most Reliable’), so the film’s triumph when it finally opened didn’t come as a huge surprise. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was forced into second place in the manufactured ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon, though it still did remarkably well to take more than £10m (Nolan’s best result since The Dark Knight Rises), contributing to the biggest UK box office weekend in more than four years. It’s also worth bearing in mind that Oppenheimer is more than an hour longer than Barbie, so cinemas could fit in only a limited number of screenings each day. The hype was bad news for everything else on release, the floptastic Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny faring particularly poorly with a 62% week-on-week drop in takings.
Image credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
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