It’s opening weekend for ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Barbie’

“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer”

This weekend, the movies belong to dolls and doom.

It’s the cinematic event of the summer: Greta Gerwig’s splashy pink romp “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “emotionally devastating” three-hour epic “Oppenheimer” rolled out in theaters this week. Aside from their prestige-y creative teams, the films have little in common, but dedicated cinephiles are devoting a full day of their lives to both. (“Barbie” is being released by Warner Bros., which shares parent company Warner Bros. Discovery with CNN.)

It’s the “Barbenheimer” double feature, and it started its life, as most phenomena do, as a meme. But as more people tweeted fan-made posters of Margot Robbie’s Barbie smiling in front of a mushroom cloud, the idea of a day spent at the movies started to sound like a good idea. (AMC said this week that 40,000 moviegoers already bought tickets to see both films on the same day — double the number it reported last week.)

It’s a gambit that some industry pundits hope could give the movie business a much-needed boost after earlier summer releases saw less-than-stellar box office returns. It’s also, perhaps, a necessity, as the Earth warms to historic highs and people grow restless in the dangerous heat. But leave the musings on death and destruction to the eponymous stars of both films.

Read up here on the quintessential way to do a “Barbenheimer” double feature, from selecting showtimes to filling the space between the two films to navigating the wide range of emotions both films will elicit. A hint — definitely leave “Barbie” for last.

In Barbie’s world, she’s the star. Her face launched a global empire, with over 1 billion dolls sold by Mattel to date; she has, for better or worse, the power to set beauty standards; and for well over a year, one of the world’s most famous actors (Margot Robbie) has been imitating her on- and off-camera. It’s her dreamhouse, her convertible — and even Ken knows his place (as Ryan Gosling woefully sings in the new “Barbie” movie).

But there is one supporting character in Barbie Land who might catch your eye. Midge, full name Margaret Hadley Sherwood, was first introduced as Barbie’s best friend in 1963 and is Barbie’s on-screen neighbor.

Midge’s run as the youthful, freckled sidekick has been sporadic and at times turbulent, with only a handful of releases in the ’60s, before she resurfaced in the ’80s and ’90s. Then, a pregnant version of the doll was unceremoniously pulled from store shelves in 2002 amid fears she was promoting teen motherhood. She only appeared in doll form once more in 2013 — until now.

With a re-released collectible timed to her 60th anniversary this year, as well as actor Emerald Fennell’s delightful turn as “creepy” pregnant Midge in “Barbie,” it just might be Midge’s time to shine. (“Barbie” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, which is also owned by CNN’s parent company.)

Read more here

Ryan Gosling in "Barbie.”

Editor’s Note: The following contains mild spoilers about “Barbie,” which was released Friday.

For the last 62 years, Ken has been the original accessory — designed only to match or complement his predestined life partner, Barbie. If Ken is a compass, Barbie is north. According to toy manufacturers Mattel, just one Ken doll is sold for every seven Barbies.

But while this may be his origin story, after the release of Greta Gerwig’s long-awaited “Barbie” movie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, it is certainly not Ken’s future. (“Barbie” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, which is also owned by CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.)

“An accessory to Barbie’s life”: Ken debuted two years after Barbie on March 11, 1961 (a day that Mattel still refers to as his “birthday”), after members of her young fanbase wrote to the company pleading that she be given a boyfriend. An army of Kens has since been unleashed into the world: “Surf City” Ken, “Western Fun” Ken, “Ice Capades” Ken and “Great Shape” Ken, to name just a few. Yet, despite being half an inch taller than Barbie, he has long stood in her shadow.

“Quite honestly, Ken’s fashion when he launched was in relation to Barbie and dressing for the dates they were going on,” Kim Culmone, head of design at Mattel, told CNN in a phone interview. “Everything related back to his role as an additional expression (of) and, frankly, an accessory to Barbie’s life.”

Culmone worked to immerse Gerwig and the movie’s costume designer, Jacqueline Durran, in Barbie and Ken’s storied fashion history. Culmone sifted through Mattel’s archives, hunting for vintage Ken dolls that could be shipped to Durran to study, and provided detailed imagery of his evolving style and career choices (from 1963’s “Doctor” Ken and 1973’s “Pilot” Ken, through to “Lifeguard” Ken in 2019). The result was a selection of costumes that, while not exact replicas, were heavily inspired by Ken’s history. Only a handful of original Mattel looks appear in the movie, including “Palm Beach Sugar Daddy” Ken and “Magic Earring” Ken, as well as “Growing Up Skipper” and “Pregnant” Midge, a doll character played by Emerald Fennell.

“(We wanted to give Durran) all of the foundations, then, to really create and tell her own fashion story for Ken,” Culmone said. “She just got the importance of fashion as a storytelling element.”

Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ryan Gosling and Ncuti Gatwa in “Barbie.”

The “Kenaissance”: Gosling’s Ken begins a voyage of self-discovery after his visit to the “real world” with Barbie becomes a crash course in gender relations. A second-class citizen at home, Ken quickly realizes that, outside Barbie Land, men come out on top. “Men rule the world,” he whispers to himself in disbelief.

Clothes are one of the first ways in which Ken recognizes this newfound influence. The outfits that catch his eye are coded symbols of machismo. He ogles a man strutting across the street wearing a floor-length white mink coat, gazes at a group of businessmen in boxy tailored suits and ponders the sweat-stained ‘80s-style sleeveless vests worn in a nearby gym. In that moment, Ken’s limited understanding of masculine dressing communicates three things: wealth, power and muscle. His life, once defined by his unrequited love for ”Stereotypical” Barbie, as the movie labels Robbie’s character, is given new focus when he discovers the patriarchy.

Read more about Ken’s style evolution here.

From carefully coordinated all-pink looks, to opulent evening outfits made in partnership with Oscar de la Renta, it’s no secret Barbie has long been one of the most fashion-forward toys on the market.

It’s a reputation forged in large part thanks to Carol Spencer, a now 90-year-old fine arts scholar who answered a newspaper job advertisement in 1963 to become Barbie’s fashion designer — a position she held for 36 years until 1999, making her the figure’s longest serving stylist.

“When I joined the company, I worked with Ruth Handler (the inventor of Barbie) who was still at Mattel,” Spencer said in a telephone interview from the 2023 Barbie convention in Orlando. “As soon as I started, I just truly fell in love with this little doll called Barbie and she became my passion.”

While at the time of this interview, Spencer hadn’t seen the movie and didn’t yet know if any of her exact designs will feature, she said scenes she had seen stay true to the spirit of the designs.

“There is a lot of pink and white gingham for example, which is a fabric pattern we used about five or six times throughout the years, but the film’s designer (Jacqueline Durran) has updated the styles — as every designer does. She’s also had to make the looks work on actors who need to move and maintain the look of the costume.”

Read more about Spencer’s storied career here.

Members and supporters of SAG-AFTRA and WGA walk the picket line at Warner Bros Studios on July 21, in Burbank, California.

Both “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” are expected to draw big audiences this weekend for their wide releases, which come as both actors and writers are on strike.

SAG-AFTRA, which represents about 160,000 Hollywood actors, went on strike last Friday after talks with major studios and streaming services failed. And more than 11,000 members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike since the beginning of May.

The issues in the actors’ strike included increased pay, as well as progress on residuals, particularly on streaming services, plus concerns about the emergence of artificial intelligence.

The dual strikes are happening for the first time since Ronald Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1960.

At the “Oppenheimer” premiere in the UK last Friday, the cast walked out of the event “to write their picket signs,” according to director Christopher Nolan.

While viewers will probably not feel any immediate effects from the strikes due to lengthy production times, it remains to be seen how films and TV could be affected in the longer term.

The strikes come at a time when the major media and tech companies that have jumped into the world of streaming services are focused on cost-cutting and profitability, rather than subscriber growth.

Movie executives are likely keeping a careful eye on the bottom lines from both “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” since the summer so far has seen disappointments at the box office, according to CNN’s Brian Lowry, who writes:

BoxOffice Pro, a publication that tracks box office performance, said this week it is projecting a $200 million-plus weekend at the cinema. That would result in one of the biggest theatrical weekends since the Covid-19 pandemic upended the industry and a big win for Hollywood studios during the strikes.

With production at a standstill, it could be the last big blockbuster weekend for quite some time.

CNN’s Chris Isidore, Alli Rosenbloom and Oliver Darcy contributed reporting to this post.

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Margot Robbie and America Ferrera were not Barbie girls as kids, but they love the Barbie world they helped create as adults.

In an interview with CNN on June 24, Ferrera said she didn’t feel Barbie represented her life and said her family couldn’t afford them anyway when she was a child, while Robbie said she was too busy running around trying to “beat the boys at everything.”

So what was it that made these two stars fall in love with the “Barbie” movie? They say it’s actually a profound classic hero’s journey.

Robbie says director Greta Gerwig surprised her with her vision. “She actually used Buddha’s journey to enlightenment as a reference. And I was like, ‘OK, wow, I, I didn’t see that coming, but now that you said it, it does make perfect sense,’” Robbie said.

And as for Barbie’s human friend, played by Ferrera, she said her character gives women permission to be their true selves.

Some Barbie background and backlash: Barbie’s original creator Ruth Handler said in her 1994 autobiography that the whole philosophy behind Barbie was “through the doll, little girls could be anything she wanted to be.”

The first Barbie doll official debuted at toy fair in New York in 1959 in a striped black-and-white bathing suit. But within five years of her debut, Barbie’s makers were being criticized by women who decried her body shape as an impossible beauty standard for girls.

It wasn’t until nearly 10 years after the doll’s debut, in 1967, that the first Barbie with dark skin was available for purchase. Her name: “Colored Francie.” And it took until 2016 for Mattel to debut four new body types for Barbie.

For decades now, there have been Barbies representing women from all over the world.

As for the new “Barbie” movie, it pokes fun at many different sides of Barbie — including her feet, which are perpetually shaped to enter a high-heeled shoe. Even in the trailer, there is a nod to the controversies surrounding the doll: “If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.”

Watch more of the interview with Robbie and Ferrera here.

Christopher Nolan attends the "Oppenheimer" premiere in Paris on July 11.

“The bomb, Dimitri. The hydrogen bomb,” an exasperated US president reminds his Soviet counterpart in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic “Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

As if the bomb could ever be forgotten. At the height of the Cold War, when mutually assured destruction was at its crazed height, nuclear warfare found itself abstracted through humor – perhaps the only reasonable way to treat something so fearsome. The bomb was a sick joke to be ridden, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally, a totem of mankind’s ingenuity and stupidity riveted shut and let fly. To look at it head-on was to be blinded by its glare; the power it wrought was too absurd — and too close — to countenance. Best to send in the clowns.

It would have seemed inconceivable then, but the atomic bomb did fade out of mind. In the 21st Century, other existential threats have reared their heads. Yet the nuclear threat feels closer today than it has for generations. And it’s precisely at this moment that Christopher Nolan is asking audiences to look it soberly in the eye.

But worry many will after watching “Oppenheimer,” his latest and perhaps greatest film to date. As the name suggests, Nolan has taken on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific genius and conflicted godfather of the atomic bomb. Working in IMAX, the director conjures an overwhelming, altogether haunting retelling of the story of the bomb’s creation and its fallout across three taut hours that pushes the limits of the medium itself.

Nolan’s screenplay – written, unusually, in the first person – drew from definitive biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, but stops short of its forensic take on the physicist. Flitting between color and monochrome – the director has described the former as a subjective and the latter an objective lens on events – we mostly experience the narrative through Oppenheimer’s eyes.

Here’s what the cast had to say.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer, rendered in Barbie form by her staff.

Politicians across the US are getting in on the “Barbie” fanfare, using social media to tout their legislative agendas and voice excitement to see the movie.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Thursday posted a series of tweets with a Barbie look-alike version of herself in a fuchsia suit giving a speech, signing legislation and cruising around in a pink convertible. 

“This Barbie is getting things done for all Michiganders,” Whitmer wrote, in one caption.

“Come on Barbie, let’s go govern,” she wrote in another.

“When they showed me the first iteration, I thought it was absolutely hilarious,” Whitmer told The New York Times about the idea of “Lil’ Gretch.” “This Barbie is going to be signing legislation! She’s going to be leading!”

Members of Congress also hopped on Twitter to play into the film’s hype.

“This Barbie wants Congress to pass the #PROAct to protect every worker’s right to organize,” Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, tweeted Thursday.

Maryland Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin posted a photo of his face over a Barbie marketing graphic that read, “This Barbie is Maryland’s senior Senator,” while Sen. Chris Van Hollen, posted a photo with a pink filter of the two of them, saying “These Barbies love Maryland,” with the caption, “Ben – we can both be Barbies.”

Senators also have been answering the question of which movie released Friday – “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer” — they plan to watch.

Asked if he’d be seeing either movie, Kansas GOP Sen. Roger Marshall said, “I sure hope to” and that his daughter is a “huge Barbie fan.”

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema tweeted a photo of her in pink next to a black and white photo of her and said, “Get you a Senator who can do both. #Barbenheimer.”

View one of Whitmer’s posts below:

Margot Robbie, Alexandra Shipp, Michael Cera, Ariana Greenblatt and America Ferrera in “Barbie.”

“Barbie” comes roaring out of the gate with an inventiveness and energy the movie perhaps inevitably can’t sustain. Amid all the hype that has made its release an increasingly rare movie-going occasion, director Greta Gerwig’s film proves an admirably ambitious attempt to ponder where Barbie fits in the 21st century – less than it could be, but pretty close to being what it should be.

Gerwig (who shares script credit with her partner, Noah Baumbach) has certainly put together all the right accessories, starting with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, in a movie whose brightly colored Barbie Land is awash in the kind of details (most of them pink) that will likely reward second viewings.

Still, the closest kin would probably be “The Lego Movie,” which similarly took a familiar toy and built a kind of existential crisis around it. While “Barbie” goes the live-action route, there’s an intermittently cartoonish quality to that, and some clunky elements (Will Ferrell’s over-the-top turn as Mattel’s CEO foremost among them, a common link between the two films) weighing down, or at least diluting, the clever ones.

The cleverest bits come early, with a Helen Mirren narration and an homage to “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But after introducing Barbie Land, occupied by various versions of Barbie and Ken living in anatomically neutered bliss, the film kicks into gear when Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie (not to be confused with the more specific variations) begins having strange thoughts, which almost literally shake her to her foundation.

At the same time, Gosling’s Ken wrestles with his relevance, and the matter of being little more than Barbie’s appendage, someone who wouldn’t exist without an ampersand.

Barbie’s awakening prompts an escape to the Real World, and different epiphanies for both her and Ken regarding its contrast to the idealized, female-centric realm in which they live.

The fewer details one knows going in the better, but the search for answers takes Barbie to Mattel, where she encounters a human employee (America Ferrera) and her teenage daughter (“65’s” Ariana Greenblatt), the latter having outgrown her Barbie phase, which ties in with the film’s overt feminist message and desire to put Barbie in a broader sociological context.

Keep reading here.

J. Robert Oppenheimer in an undated photo.

“Oppenheimer” is one of the first blockbuster biopics to open since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Director Christopher Nolan’s latest creation concerns an earlier existential threat, telling the story of the atomic bomb through the lens of its creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer is widely considered the father of the atomic bomb. Born on April 22, 1904 in New York, he was the son of a German textile importer. He quickly rose to prominence as an internationally renowned physicist, employed by the US government to create an atomic bomb to quell the threat of Nazi Germany.

But his career was marred by controversy as he struggled to deal with the implications of creating the world’s first nuclear explosion.

Oppenheimer told interviewers two decades later that when the Trinity test bomb exploded on July 16, 1945 at a remote site in the New Mexico desert, “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.” He said he remembered a line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Oppenheimer believed the creation of an atomic bomb was necessary to bring about the end of World War II. But he was haunted by the knowledge that by creating the bomb he was also enabling the destruction of the world.

This moral conflict ultimately led to his disgrace, when he opposed the creation of the hydrogen bomb on moral and political grounds, and was accused of slowing down the development of the hydrogen bomb.

The United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) said in 1954: “If Dr. Oppenheimer had enthusiastically supported the thermonuclear program either before or after the determination of national policy, the H-bomb project would have been pursued with considerably more vigor, thus increasing the possibility of earlier success in this field.”

Read more about Oppenheimer’s life and work here.

Notifications popped up on Barbie Koelker’s phone for days after a trailer for the “Barbie” movie first came out. Friends were eager to know what she thought.

“They know that I’ve fought for people to just take Barbie seriously,” Koelker says.

The 38-year-old marketing executive in Los Angeles says she was thrilled to catch a glimpse of the film.

The Rev. Barbara Aziz had a very different reaction. When she first heard about the new movie, one thought ran through her mind: “Oh gosh – here we go again.”

For decades, the 57-year-old pastor in Texas has pushed back whenever anyone tried to foist that name on her. “You can call me anything,” she often says, “anything but Barbie.”

Since her debut in 1959, Barbie’s name has been one of the doll’s most well-known features.

Barbie – which in the doll’s case, is short for Barbara Millicent Roberts – was already a nickname for Barbara long before Mattel’s version hit the shelves, and a name some parents gave their children. But as the doll’s popularity grew, a Barbie baby boom of sorts followed.

According to data from the Social Security Administration, 1964 was the name’s most popular year, with 190 real-life Barbies born in the United States. It’s remained a nickname for Barbaras, too – beloved by some who love the doll, and spurned by others who don’t identify with what they think it represents.

“I love Barbie. I could talk about her for hours,” says Barbie Hargrave, 52, of Baltimore.

Of course, when it comes to the iconic doll, it’s not only real-life Barbies who have something to say. The doll’s unrealistic proportions and forever-arched feet have fueled decades of cultural criticism.

But these days, many women who spent their youth gleefully hoisting Dream House elevators, pushing around stylish Corvettes and keeping track of an endless array of tiny high heels are feeling fired up about Barbie’s big-screen moment. (“Barbie” is being released by Warner Bros., which like CNN is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery.)

And who better than real-life Barbies, Barbs and Barbaras to remind us why the doll, and now the movie, mean so much to generations of women? Here’s what some of them had to say when CNN contacted them.

Cillian Murphy appears in “Oppenheimer.”

“Oppenheimer” seeks to match the mythological nature of its central theme – an “American Prometheus,” punished for bringing humankind the seeds of its potential destruction – with a movie of equal heft, scale and (most of all) length. Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s epic film essentially consists of three chapters, with the middle, Atlas-like, holding up the weaker, drawn-out beginning and end.

In a way, this biography of Robert Oppenheimer, who came to be known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” serves as a sort-of World War II bookend for Nolan, along with “Dunkirk,” around his jumbled “Tenet.” Yet where “Dunkirk” possessed crisp economy, “Oppenheimer” sprawls out with a giant cast and back-and-forth structure that takes some time to settle in, and even then will likely leave many viewers rushing to Google to flesh out its details.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and concerns about the latest war in Europe involving a nuclear power feed an unsettling “The past is prologue” sensation watching the movie, made more sobering by its protagonist’s naive hope that nuclear deterrence will make war “unthinkable.”

Still, Nolan juggles a lot, in a way that somewhat works to the movie’s detriment. The excellent midsection proves fascinating, in which Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) guides scientists and the military in a desperate race to catch the Nazis – told, rightly, that he has become as much a politician and salesman as a physicist.

By contrast, the film sags a bit during both his pre-war years and post-Hiroshima regrets. At the least, some judicious editing could have curbed the three-hour running time without sacrificing (indeed, perhaps enhancing) its impact. And while there’s power in artfully presenting how devastating the bomb was, “Oppenheimer” surprisingly spares us from the grisly aftermath of the Japanese cities targeted. (Nolan has explained that’s because the movie unfolds principally from its namesake’s point of view.)

The key device filters this sweeping history through a Cold War era hearing meant to determine if Oppenheimer should have his security clearance denied, retaliation for his outspokenness about nuclear policy. His persecutors exercise leverage based on his pre-war associations with communists, among them his relationship with the alluring and troubled psychiatrist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh).

Read more here.

A still from the film “Barbie.”

When the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie was first released, Google Trend searches for fluffy mules shot up 115 percent. This was, of course, largely inspired by the trailer’s scene featuring Margot Robbie’s Barbie stepping out of her pink stilettos and into a tip-toe pose, a reference to the doll’s signature stance due to her perpetually frozen feet. (In 2015, Mattel began making Barbie dolls with adjustable ankles so she could finally relax — and wear flats.)

With a wardrobe now spanning 64 years worth of fashion, she’s had her pick of footwear, but Barbie has been closely associated with the stiletto mule — also called the stiletto slide or sandal — since her inception.

It’s clear that shoes are an important totem in Barbieland; in the movie, Barbie’s feet, or what happens to them, serve as a key plotline. When it becomes clear that her arches have fallen, it’s a bad omen. When she seeks wisdom from Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie, she must choose between pink pumps or brown Birkenstocks, seemingly à la the infamous red pill-blue pill dilemma in “The Matrix.”

And throughout the film’s meticulously thought-out press tour, Robbie has been knocking out look after Barbie-themed look, with designer pieces frequently paired with high-heeled mules custom designed by Manolo Blahnik — like a take on the 1964 “Sparkling Pink” Barbie, for example, which Robbie replicated for a press conference in Seoul, South Korea.

“When you walk in mules, you walk a bit differently…Madame de ­Pompadour in her mules, walking around Versailles, click click click,” Blahnik once quipped. “Can you think of anything more exquisite?”

Keep reading here.

Advertisements for the films "Oppenheimer" and "Barbie" appear at an AMC theater in Los Angeles, California, on Thursday, July 20.

Wake up and ready your double-feature supplies (recommended: chocolate, roomy sweatshirt, your fuzziest socks).

10:50 a.m.: Arrive 10 minutes early for “Oppenheimer,” get an extra-large popcorn and prepare for cinematic annihilation.

2:30 p.m.: Stew on “Oppenheimer,” swoon over Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh, look into trips to New Mexico. Grab lunch and consider the fate of the world.

4 p.m.: See “Barbie,” preferably wearing something pink. Take the Ken in your life.

6:15 p.m.: Exit the theater embracing your newfound Kenergy. Maybe go dancing!