Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has claimed both Barbie and Oppenheimer would have the same success if the two films had released on the streaming site. As per a report by Variety, Ted said that both the films ‘would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix’. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie released on the same day – July 21. (Also read: Margot Robbie opens up about crisis before filming Barbie: ‘I’d spent years trying to get this movie going’)
What Ted said
The report added that Ted said, “I don’t think that there’s a clean answer because the best version of something may work really well for Netflix but just hasn’t worked to date. There’s some obvious ones, like we don’t do breaking news and that kind of thing, because I think there’s a lot of other outlets for it. People aren’t looking to us for that.”
When he was asked about the phenomenal success of Barbie and Oppenheimer, he added, “Both of those movies would be great for Netflix. They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix. And so I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that certain kinds of movies do or don’t work. There’s no reason to believe that the movie itself is better in any size of screen for all people. My son’s an editor. He is 28 years old, and he watched Lawrence of Arabia on his phone.”
More details
While both Barbie and Oppenheimer are from entirely different genres, their battle of box office gave rise to the meme Barbenheimer since people were torn between which film to watch first.
Greta Gerwig’s satire starring Margot Robbie in the titular role of Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken went on to make over $1 billion at the global box office. Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer, with Cillian Murphy in the titular role, went quite close to that mark.
