Francis Ford Coppola Calls “Barbenheimer” a “Victory for Cinema”

While Barbie and Oppenheimer are about to finish their second weekend at the box office, the double feature craze known as “Barbenheimer” is still taking over the world. Both films have received rave reviews and praise for how they have helped save the box office from a lukewarm Summer movie season. Now the pair of films have received high praise from one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers, Francis Ford Coppola.

While answering fan questions on his Instagram story this past Friday, The Godfather director was asked if he’d seen Barbenheimer yet. He responded, “I have yet to see them, but the fact that people are filling big theaters to see them and that they are neither sequels nor prequels, no number attached to them, meaning they are true one-offs, is a victory for cinema.”

After the last few months of watching films like The Flash, Indiana Jones, and Mission: Impossible underperform at the box office, it looked like the Summer was going to continue its bleak streak in theaters. However, that all changed after Barbenheimer’s historic opening weekend which combined for nearly $250 million at the domestic box office. That gave the pair of films the fourth best combined opening in history. That magic only continued into the films’ first full week of release with theaters flooded in seas of pink and fancy atomic attire.

Meme culture and the internet helped build so much anticipation for these two films during their marketing campaigns that Barbenheimer became cinema’s next must see event. That has helped their explosive second weekend that has seen Barbie make an additional $93 million and Oppenheimer make $46 million domestically. Barbie has now made over $774 million worldwide while Oppenheimer has made an explosive $400 million, taking their combined totals to over $1 billion at the global box office.

Barbenheimer’s Box Office Future

The sky’s the limit to what Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan’s films can do by the end of the box office run, but one thing for sure, Barbenheimer has helped make people excited to go to the movies again. That’s certainly going to help the box office in subsequent months. Someone as talented as Coppola, who has his own $100 million blockbuster coming soon, certainly knows this.