For most of cinema history, the idea of making $1 billion at the box office was an outlandish fantasy. The idea of $1 billion was pretty crazy in general. But as inflation continued to depress the value of a dollar over the decades, box office hauls went up, and now there’s a good number of movies in the billion-dollar club: 52, as of this writing.
2023 already produced a new billion-dollar movie: The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which has already shot to #15 on the list of highest-grossing movies of all time. And now, the likes of Avatar and Avengers: Endgame have welcomed a new member into the club: Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig.
Barbie has taken the world by storm recently, helped along by a clear vision from Gerwig, great performances from the likes of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, and the unlikely double feature with the historical biopic Oppenheimer, which isn’t doing so bad itself with a $550 million haul. Barbie, as of this moment, has around $1,000,381,413 in the bank, according to The Numbers. It has the number 45 spot and is very likely to keep rising; we’re not quite done with Barbie fever just yet.
Greta Gerwig becomes first female director to helm a billion-dollar movie solo
That’s an impressive achievement for any movie, but the Barbie movie is special, since it’s the first film directly solely by a woman to cross the billion-dollar threshold. By “solely” I mean that Gerwig was the only director on this movie. A few other billion-dollar movies have been co-directed by a woman and a man — Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck directed Captain Marvel together, while Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck teamed up to make both Frozen 1 and 2, all of which made the cut. But Gerwig directed Barbie on her own.
Now that Barbie is a big success, Mattel is readying movies based on other toys like Hot Wheels and Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. Whether they can go the distance remains to be seen; something tells me that Gerwig had a crucial X factor here.
And in any case, when you adjust box office returns for inflation, pretty much all movies are far behind the frontrunner: the 1939 film Gone With The Wind. If Gerwig and Mattel are up for a challenge, topping that film will be near impossible, but the fun is in the chase. So sure, bring on the Cabbage Patch Kids movie. The world is ready for them.
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