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While “Barbie” earned the biggest opening of the summer this past weekend, Universal’s “Oppenheimer” pulled off an equally impressive feat, defying all expectations to gross an $82 million opening.
The perhaps unanswerable question here is how much of this success did the movie achieve on its own, drawing on director Chris Nolan’s reputation as a cinematic auteur, and how much it benefited from the “Barbenheimer” hype around two very different movies opening on the same day. Demographic data suggests its outsized box office haul came in part from younger audiences — those who also powered “Barbie” to the top of the box office — showing up in greater numbers than Universal expected.