Box office: Gran Turismo challenges Barbie for the top spot

Plus: Barbie sets more records, Blue Beetle has the best hold of any recent DC movie, and Liam Neeson action movies continue to struggle in the age of streaming.

Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) enters the box-office race.

A racecar and a doll are vying for the top spot at the box office this week.

The brand new Gran Turismo, which is about a video gamer who becomes a racecar driver for real, and the six-week-old Barbie, which is about a doll who is drawn to the real world in her own way, both earned an estimated $17 million this weekend.

Current estimates give Gran Turismo the edge, but the figures for both films have big asterisks next to them: Gran Turismo’s “opening weekend” estimate includes two weekends of preview screenings, not just Thursday-night “previews”, while in Barbie’s case, the studio is predicting an unusually large surge in ticket sales on Sunday.

Whichever film wins in the end, one thing seems certain: this week will probably have the lowest-grossing #1 film of any weekend since early February.

Complicating matters this week is the fact that many theatres were charging only $4 per ticket on Sunday as part of National Cinema Day. Lower prices could mean a drop in revenue, but they could also mean larger ticket sales overall—which, on balance, could mean more revenue, thus the anticipated surge for Barbie.

As ever, we shall see.

In the meantime, a few general points about the current state of ‘Barbenheimer’:

Barbie, with its current cumulative gross of $594.8 million, has passed The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($574.5 million) to become the top-grossing movie of the year in North America—but it still lags behind that film overseas and worldwide.

Meanwhile, Oppenheimer grossed an estimated $7.8 million this weekend, which just nudged it over the $300 million line in North America—making it only the third Christopher Nolan film to gross that much, following the two Dark Knight sequels.

Notably, both films continue to perform very well when you compare each weekend of their release to the equivalent weekends of their fellow post-Covid films:

This chart does not depict the figures for Weekends 1 to 3.

A few extra points to note about that chart:

• Barbie is now one of only six films this decade that have grossed over $10 million in their sixth weekends.

• Barbie is now, for the first time ever, behind where Avatar: The Way of Water was at the equivalent point in its release.

  • Barbie is still ahead of Top Gun: Maverick, but the gap is closing.

    • Top Gun was about $60 million behind Barbie two weeks ago; now it’s only about $30 million behind.

    • Top Gun did eventually pass Avatar, so it will pass Barbie, too.

• Oppenheimer previously had the 17th-best first weekend of the post-Covid era, and its second to fifth weekends ranked between ninth-best and 13th-best. Now it has the seventh-best sixth weekend of the post-Covid era.

And now, a few more stats re: this week’s top ten (actually twelve, because three films are virtually tied for the #10 spot right now!), title by title: