As Barbie approaches its opening weekend, all plastic eyes are on the box office numbers – oh, and Ken and Barbie, too. And while numbers are looking quite strong, with the movie potentially taking in upwards of $80 million, Margot Robbie had different expectations in her head…like, a billion dollars worth of expectations.
In a new interview, Margot Robbie said she went into an important meeting and told the suits that Barbie would undoubtedly make $1 billion at the box office, even comparing it to what it must have been like for Steven Spielberg to bring Jurassic Park to Universal. “I think my pitch in the green-light meeting was the studios have prospered so much when they’re brave enough to pair a big idea with a visionary director. And then I gave a series of examples like, ‘dinosaurs and [Steven] Spielberg,’ that and that, that and that – pretty much naming anything that’s been incredible and made a ton of money for the studios over the years. And I was like, ‘And now you’ve got Barbie and Greta Gerwig.’ And I think I told them that it’d make a billion dollars, which maybe I was overselling, but we had a movie to make, okay?!”
Barbie is indeed an oddball pitch considering the vast majority of the movies in the franchise never got a shot at the box office, having gone straight to video, with dozens upon dozens of entries. Through these, merch and some box office, the media franchise itself has raked in more than $32 billion, which will of course bump up significantly once Greta Gerwig’s Barbie hits screens. While Barbie will top the box office this week – suck on that, Oppenheimer! – it will get nowhere near the $1 billion mark, a territory only 50 movies have hit worldwide. Robbie may have been joking – or blurting out anything in that meeting – but we’re still rooting for its success…with all due respect to the father of the atomic bomb.
Will you be pumping up Barbie’s numbers at the box office this weekend? How much do you think it will gross in its run? Give us your predictions below!
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