Originally published at: Barbie pounds Oppenheimer's box office, but both movies are dominating | Boing Boing
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It must be noted that this ice cream treat Best Cake Ever™ Cold Stone Creamery Signature Cakes is actually a Barbenheimer promotion because it is full of yellowcake.
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Oppenheimer to Barbie afterwards: “can I offer you like a cigarette?”
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Has a movie in the last few years had a more pervasive advertising campaign? I am amazed at how many news outlets have been carrying “stories” about this movie before it was even released.
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Given that headline and the context of the Oppenheimer film, I’m just really glad the movie is about “Barbie” Barbie and not Klaus Barbie.
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Oppenheimer runtime: 3 hours 2 min. Was the dust blown off the concept of an intermission? (“bah… boomer bladders piss off”)
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Honestly, the hype around this/these is such a freaking relief after months of political anxiety, combined with a little breathing space for other headlines.
I’d almost forgotten what anticipatory glee felt like (seeing Oppenheimer later today).
Also… :chefskiss:
Barbie pounds Oppenheimer’s box
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Weird that you’d ask that about Barbie, but not Oppenheimer… or any other hollywood film. You’re also not asking it about Sound of Freedom. 
On top of that, given all the other stuff around it, there are likely plenty of genuine interest about the film out there. Obviously, there is plenty of promotional stuff around films (shows like Entertainment Tonight, or whatever). But I seriously doubt that stories discussing the feminist aspects of the film on like NPR are any more paid promotions than explorations of the history of Oppenheimer and how that might compare to the film… I mean, people actual make livings as film critics by writing film criticism. 
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Yes. Dozens have.
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See every Marvel movie, any recent film that included the Joker… how quickly we forget all the hype around the Joaquin Phoenix film that one could not get away from when it came out. Just endless thought pieces about whether or not this would be an incel film that would cause a wave of violence…
I wonder what’s different about this movie that makes this kind of hype campaign that is common for big budget summer films suspect?
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The list goes on:
Avatar Waterwhatever,
Mission Impossible IVX
Indiana Jones and the McGuffin
Heck, even the D&D movie had more pervasive promotion.
And let’s not forget Top Gun Maverick. You couldn’t escape that movie’s promotion if you went into the wilderness with no electronics. They painted mini-billboards for it on elk and deer, it seemed like.
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It’s just the nature of Hollywood and the current studio system. And for all the promotion, there was often plenty of genuine cultural discussions around these films as well, because culture, even mass produced culture, matters and people want to talk about it, and derive some meaning from it. We are just wired that way as people…
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A Chuck Tingle production.
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She should offer him a cigarette. She pounded his box, not the other way around.
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Oppenheimer smoked for most of his life and died in 1967 from throat cancer at the age of 62.
One of Oppenheimer’s physics students in the late ‘30s at the University of California — Berkeley, Edward Gerjuoy, recalled that “the most distinctive feature of his lectures [was] his chain smoking. He spoke quite rapidly, and puffed equally rapidly. When one cigarette burned down to a fragment he no longer could hold, he extinguished it and lit another almost in a single motion.”
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All that box pounding will do that
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This question only gets asked about movies marketed at women and children.
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If only someone had made that very same intimation above… sadly, no one did… 
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Literally every major release movie has been advertised similarly for years and most of them are also built around toy franchises of some kind of another too. So… yes. Definitely many other movies fit that criteria. It’s basically the sole criteria that changes movies people don’t hear about into movies people have heard of and talk about, which is what drives people to pay to see the movie, which is how they make money on the movie, the promise of which is how people who make movies get budgets for movie making in the future… and obnoxious advertising online, including outrage manufacture, has been in the cards for a long time too.
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