On the last 21st, the premiere of one of the biggest box office disputes in cinema of all time completed a month. Despite the delayed premiere, Barbie was released in Japanese theaters on the 11th, while Oppenheimer has no forecast of arriving in the country.
This delay, however, has a lot to do with Japan’s common postponement of new Hollywood movie releases to measure public approval and market value. But in the case of the film directed by Christopher Nolan, the main theme of the film, the creation of the atomic bomb and the serious historical events that culminated in the end of World War II, may be much more connected to this delay than any other factor.
In this context, “Barbenheimer” memes reverberated across the internet. The name is explained by the fusion of the titles of the two great films that, due to the same release date and being of such different genres, caught the attention of the audience.
Not just the title, as well as images uniting the collective imagination of the pink universe with the black and white of the nuclear tragedy, were widely disseminated by newspapers and social media users, in addition to being used as propellants in the feature films’ advertising campaign.
The consequence of this was the formal apology made by Warner Bros. itself after the official American Barbie account responded positively to some tweets about the meme. In one of them, the account wrote: “It’s going to be a summer to remember 😘💕” replying to a montage that featured the protagonist of Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy, carrying Margot Robbie‘s Barbie on his shoulders, while there is smoke from an explosion in the background.
In response, Warner Bros. Japan posted a statement criticizing the Western parent company’s attitude through the official Barbie Movie Twitter account, while Japanese internet users also expressed their discomfort with the platform. “Because the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer were both released in the US on 21 July, there is currently a movement driven by overseas fans to watch them together (#Barbenheimer), but this is not an official movement. We find the reaction to this fan-driven movement from the official US account for the movie Barbie to be extremely regrettable. We take this very seriously and are asking the US head office to take appropriate action. We apologize to those offended by these inconsiderate actions”, said the statement.
A few days before the memorials were held in Japan for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, exactly 78 years ago, the hashtag #NoBarbenheimer reached Trending Topics in the country and created a wave of protests against the trivialization of the tragedy, which left more than 210,000 people killed on August 6 and 9, 1945, dominated the internet. Additionally, a Change.org petition demanding that Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures, the studio behind Oppenheimer, suspend the hashtag collected more than 20,000 signatures.
Despite the repercussions, it is still possible to see some Barbenheimer memes circulating in the media. At the time of publication of this article, the film Oppenheimer still has no premiere date scheduled in Japan.
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The article above was edited by Beatriz Oliveira.
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