Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has said Barbie and Oppenheimer, which released on the same day in 2023 in an enormously successful movie event dubbed Barbenheimer, would have performed just as well on his streaming platform.
Speaking to The New York Times, Sarandos said both films would have been good fits for Netflix and they’d have found just as many viewers on the platform. Barbie won the box office battle, ending up as the 14th best performing film of all time with $1,453,683,476, while Oppenheimer pulled in a still impressive $974,584,960.
“Both of those movies would be great for Netflix,” Sarandos said. “They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix.
They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix.
“I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that certain kinds of movies do or don’t work. There’s no reason to believe that the movie itself is better in any size of screen for all people. My son’s an editor. He is 28 years old, and he watched Lawrence of Arabia on his phone.”
Box office analysts were blown away Barbie and Oppenheimer’s influence on the industry, however. “I’ve been in the business of tracking and analyzing box office trends and movies for 30 years now, and I’ve never quite seen anything like this,” senior media analyst at Comscore, Paul Dergarabedian, told IGN in 2023.
Whether or not the films could have achieved the same success on Netflix will never be known, of course, but Sarandos is certainly confident.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
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