"If you're scared to be up against us, then you move your date," Robbie, who also served as the executive producer on 'Barbie' reportedly told 'Oppenheimer' head Charles Roven.
Don’t mess with Barbie!
In Variety‘s latest Actors on Actors interview released Tuesday, Margot Robbie sat down with Cillian Murphy where the pair discussed their blockbuster hits, Barbie and Oppenheimer.
The films created a phenomenon at the box office, aptly titled Barbenheimer, with fans lining up in droves to catch a double feature of the darker, Oppenheimer, and the fun, albeit empowering Barbie.
But the mashup nearly didn’t happen, Oppenheimer heads reportedly asking Robbie and Barbie execs to push back the Greta Gerwig-directed film’s release date.
It was a request Robbie says she declined, telling Murphy, when the film’s producer, Charles Roven, who had worked with Robbie on Suicide Squad, came to her and asked her to split the movie’s premieres to two separate dates, she declined.
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“One of your producers, Chuck Roven, called me, because we worked together on some other projects. And he was like, ‘I think you guys should move your date,'” Robbie recalled. “And I was like, ‘We’re not moving our date. If you’re scared to be up against us, then you move your date.’ And he’s like, ‘We’re not moving our date. I just think it’d be better for you to move.’ And I was like, ‘We’re not moving!’ I think this is a really great pairing, actually. It’s a perfect double billing, Oppenheimer and Barbie.”
She continued, “Clearly the world agreed. Thank God. The fact that people were going and being like, ‘Oh, watch Oppenheimer first, then Barbie.” I was like, ‘See? People like everything.’ People are weird. People have specific and wide-ranging tastes.”
“And they don’t like being told what to do. Audiences don’t like being told, ‘You should see this or you should see that.’ They will decide and they will generate the interest themselves,” Murphy added. “And I think what happened with both of our movies was a case and point of [how] the audience decided that this was correct and this was right.”
Robbie’s instinct was indeed right, with both movies ending up making cultural and box office history — Oppenheimer becoming the highest ever grossing biopic, and Barbie seeing the highest-ever global haul for a live-action movie from a female director.
Of Barbenheimer, Murphy, who has been trolled online for being unaware of memes said, “It was impossible to avoid any of that stuff.”
Barbenheimer: Box Office Bomb vs Bombshell
“Weren’t there some great ones? People are so clever,” Robbie gushed. “People kept asking me, ‘So is each marketing department talking to each other?’ And I was like, ‘No, this is the world doing this! This is not a part of the marketing campaign.'”
It happened, the Peaky Blinders actor surmised, in part because both movies were so good.
“In fact, that summer, there was a huge diversity of stuff in the cinema, and I think it just connected in a way that you or I or the studios or anybody could never have predicted,” Murphy said.
It’s something you “can’t force” or “orchestrate,” Robbie noted.
“No, and it may never happen again,” Murphy added.
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