Barbie dream house!
Hi, Barbie.
[creepy music]
Barbie.
See Barbie.
-Barbie. -Hi, Barbie!
-Barbieland. -Barbie—
Barbie—
[creepy music continues]
Hi, Barbie.
[heartbeat sounds]
Guess what, Barbie fans—
Hi, Barbie.
-Hi, Barbie. -Hi, Barbie!
In the summer of 2023, Barbie took over.
[overlapping and repeated] Barbie!
The film was inescapable.
Put Barbie isn't the first movie
to do a massive summer takeover.
“It is as if God created the devil...
and gave him...
Jaws.”
Jaws basically
invented the modern blockbuster, I guess, is the way to put it.
I’m Alissa Wilkinson.
I’m a senior correspondent at Vox and a critic.
Before Jaws, no movie had made $100 million at the box office.
This didn't happen by accident.
It was all a strategy that started long before Jaws, the movie.
And—okay, so I could talk about Jaws for literally hours.
But in the interest of time, here are the highlights:
[driving string music]
“From the bestselling novel...
Jaws.”
Jaws was a book first
which is true of a lot of movies obviously, and always has been.
Producers at Universal acquired the film rights to Jaws
before Peter Benchley even got the book published.
They started pouring money into the book's marketing.
They got it into book clubs
designating it as Book-of-the-Month.
There was skywriting at beaches that said “Read Jaws.”
Hype was built and perhaps inevitably
Jaws, the novel, became a blockbuster in its own right.
Sitting at the top of the bestsellers lists for 44 weeks straight.
The intellectual property was effectively leveraged.
Then, just one year after the book release...
the film came out and it was... good.
A giant shark, beautiful cinematography
and an innovative score that kept you on the edge of your seat.
It couldn't really be more appealing.
When the studio showed it to test audiences
they realized they had a massive hit on their hands.
And so they started sinking money early into marketing.
So I believe the number they spent on marketing
was somewhere in the $1.8 million range.
Or about $11 million in 2023 dollars.
That's not anything compared to the amount
that movies are marketed for now, but it was a lot at the time.
A large chunk of that cash was spent on television ads.
In the days before its opening weekend, they saturated the market
buying 30 second spots on every prime time television show
on all the major networks...
or at least the ones that would let them
which was about 80 to 85%.
Time magazine featured Jaws on its front cover...
and for a while it seemed like you couldn't escape the film.
It's not just the idea
that you know the movie's coming out
but also that it's an event you need to be part of
and that you'll be missing out if you don't take part in it.
The main reason that say
I don't know, like a Citizen Kane
or 2001: A Space Odyssey are not considered blockbusters
is in that time
you would release a movie in maybe like one or two cities
and then it would roll out slowly.
Jaws didn't follow that strategy.
It opened in 409 theaters in the US
and 55 more in Canada on June 20th, 1975
squarely in the middle of summer
which makes sense as Jaws was all about warm weather and beaches.
But back then, big movies didn't often release in the summer.
Why would summer be a good time?
You know, you want to be outside where it's nice
and this is sort of pre-air-conditioning for a lot of people.
So maybe it's very uncomfortable.
All these factors, the book promo
the intense movie promo, the timing...
it all led Jaws to become the highest grossing movie ever made at that point
crossing the $100 million mark
just 61 days after its release.
When something is successful in Hollywood
what we immediately see are repeats.
Over and over, derivations, copies
but also just attempts to capture lightning in a bottle. Again.
We have blockbusters every year since then...
that are using essentially the Jaws formula.
The Star Wars movies, Indiana Jones movies, Mission Impossible movies.
All of these different films
really count as blockbusters, in part because
they replicated that formula.
Now, a lot changes between Jaws and Barbie...
but when you look at the overlying blockbuster strategy
they're almost formulaicly identical.
They both leverage preexisting IP, though with Barbie...
It's much bigger than the Jaws thing.
You know, we're talking about decades of toys, decades of commercials.
They were both released in the summer on every screen possible...
and they both set market saturation to the extreme.
But what separates Barbie from
all the blockbusters that came before
is that it had a much steeper uphill battle.
There has always been the perception
among the predominantly male executives of Hollywood
that women will go see a movie starring a man
but men won't go see movies starring women.
And whether or not that's
a cultural product of just not having movies
starring women is a big, big question.
So making Barbie is obviously a gamble.
To mitigate that gamble
the Barbie team needed to act strategically.
The first step was elevating
the idea of what a Barbie movie could be.
They brought in someone with, I would say, a defined style
or at least a defined idea of what kinds of stories she tells.
Greta Gerwig has generally made smaller
thoughtful films about the human condition...
making her an unconventional choice for something of this scale.
It sent the message that Hollywood wasn't
just making a Barbie cash grab movie.
The movie would be more elevated and subversive than you might expect.
I mean, the first trailer references
the evolution of man scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey...
a movie that came out in 1968 that's like 3 hours long
and literally about all of human life, which is very cool...
but also very film bro.
Which I can say because, you know, I mean, look at me.
That trailer was dropped before Avatar: The Way of Water...
a blockbuster that was poised to be a big hit...
meaning you could get maximum exposure.
But it's not a typical pairing.
You know: Horror movies usually have horror trailers preceding them.
Action movies have action trailers.
To put Barbie before Avatar was a clear signal
that they were trying to reach across
to an audience that wouldn't immediately be into Barbie.
For a long time
this is what Barbie looked like.
But the movie and the marketing took a different approach
representing more types of people
and allowing anybody to become Barbie.
Either by using the selfie generator or...
You can make a Barbie figure of yourself.
You can stand in the pink box
and take a picture and put it on Instagram.
You know, I think I'm the only person who hasn't done that
like in the world at this point.
You could say in Barbie's dream house, thanks to Airbnb
or watch your favorite interior designers
build the Barbie dreamhouse...
thanks to HGTV.
You could live the Barbie lifestyle in the real world.
This isn't something you can do with other blockbusters.
Like you could buy the Flash’s sneakers...
but one: They never wears those sneakers in the movie.
Two, more importantly:
They don't really let you embody the character fully.
But you could be Barbie in one simple way.
It's pink.
It's just pink.
So you could walk around in pink clothing.
And it was a Barbie thing.
Or there's a cafe that popped up.
That was the Barbie Cafe.
It's hard to overstate the power of simplicity
with brand tie ins.
Like, I'd love to be Spider-Man...
but finding something with graphic design
that I like is... challenging.
But you want a Barbie burger?
Give it some pink ooze
and you got yourself a brand tie-in.
Barbie outfits?
It's as easy as this.
According to Josh Goldstein, the Head of Marketing at WB...
it stopped being a marketing campaign and became a movement.
They didn't have to reach out to every brand
because every brand wanted a bite of the Barbie apple.
Can I talk about Barbenheimer now?
-[Ed, off-screen] Please! -Okay!
Barbenheimer jokes started where it was like:
Isn't it funny that these two are coming out on the same day?
And it is.
One is dark.
It's just dark.
The other one is pink.
Thematically, one is about death
and the other one is maybe also about death.
You ever think about dying? [record scratch]
Like that would be weird and funny.
And then people thought:
Well, wouldn't it be funnier if you went
and saw both movies on the same day?
And the result of this, I think, is that Barbie...
got a boost because men who might have felt weird about
just buying a ticket for a Barbie movie...
now they're going to see it as part of a double feature.
So it's kind of a bit.
And Oppenheimer definitely got a boost from the same.
The marketing was a mix of strategy
luck and a bunch of tie ins and it paid off.
The box office for Barbie was definitely surprising
in the way that the box office for Black Panther
was considered surprising at the time...
which was that they expected it to make a lot of money.
They just didn't expect it to make that much money...
that fast in the theater.
Barbie crossed the billion dollar mark
in just 17 days at the box office.
Only 53 movies have done that so far.
And Barbie is the only one solely directed by a woman.
According to Variety, the Barbie marketing team
spent an estimated $150 million marketing the movie
against the production budget of $145 million.
Meaning they spent more money
marketing the movie than they did making it.
This isn't uncommon...
but throwing money into marketing doesn't always work out.
It might help your opening weekend
but keeping that momentum going is often harder.
One thing that's really unique about Barbie for 2023, anyhow
is that people are going back to see it multiple times.
And I think it's because it's sort of a unique film
in the blockbuster world in that it's kind of subversive.
It's got a little bit of everything for a cinephile
but it's also very warm and very warm-hearted.
Like it's not a bummer of a movie and it's funny!
To get to a billion generally you need both things:
A good movie and a great marketing campaign.
In 2023, the year of Barbie...
Warner Brothers was able to synthesize them both.
Hey, if you're still around
thank you so much for watching this video.
I genuinely appreciate it.
Like with all our videos...
there is just so much to put into every story
and I couldn't fit it all in.
But if you want to learn some more, I'm going to leave
some interesting podcasts in the description below
which were awesome and so fun and dove into Jaws and Barbie...
in ways that I just couldn't in the making of this video.
And while you're in the description, you might notice one other link:
vox.com/give-now.
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