Behind ‘Operation Barbie Summer’: How Warner Bros. Created a $162 Million Box Office Triumph

After nearly a year of box office misfires, Warner Bros. has ended its losing streak in the biggest way imaginable with “Barbie,” which scored a $162 million opening and become one of the studio’s top five highest-opening weekends in history.

It is also the first major theatrical victory for the new Warner leadership under Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who called on his team early this year to build an all-in marketing campaign internally called “Operation Barbie Summer” to promote to the world writer-director Greta Gerwig’s unique vision of the most famous doll ever made across the media portfolio created by the company’s merger last year.

The results speak for themselves. Along with this strong opening, “Barbie” has an A on CinemaScore and scores of 4.5/5 from general audiences on PostTrak and a 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. With no films expected to open over $40 million for the rest of the summer, the road is clear for “Barbie” to become one of the season’s biggest hits on a $145 million production budget, much cheaper than many of this summer’s franchise titles.

“It really was a company-wide initiative to get the word out about how special this movie is,” Warner Bros. domestic distribution chief Jeff Goldstein told TheWrap. “The marketing campaign for this movie is one for the ages, and the result is a movie that has united the world in such a divisive time. It’s a pink unicorn.”

According to multiple Warner Bros. executives and insiders who spoke to TheWrap, including Warner’s motion picture group co-chair Michael De Luca, the plan started back in January when Zaslav called all of his top lieutenants at Warner Bros. Discovery to discuss plans to make “Barbie” a summer hit.

The first phase of that plan had already begun with a teaser trailer for “Barbie” that was attached to screenings of Disney/20th Century’s “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which grossed $2.3 billion worldwide.

As a result, millions of moviegoers got to see what would be the opening of Gerwig’s film: a parody of the “Dawn of Man” segment from “2001: A Space Odyssey” that showed how the arrival of Barbie radically changed how dolls were sold to little girls. Combined with quick clips of the colorful world of Barbieland that Gerwig’s film would showcase, Warner instantly hooked moviegoers impressed by its bright world, the sort that isn’t usually seen in summer tentpoles.

At that meeting, De Luca said it was clear to Zaslav and the team that Gerwig had created something that would truly stand out on the summer slate, bringing the humor and heart she showed the world with her 2017 film “Lady Bird” and the feminist voice she built with her 2019 follow-up “Little Women,” both of which earned her Oscar nominations for her screenplays.

“This is a movie that has so much to say about this famous doll and its legacy as well as wider thoughts on the world, but it never stops being playful and funny every step of the way,” De Luca said. “Our goal was to show everyone that ‘Barbie’ was more than just a movie featuring Barbie.”

To do this, Zaslav and the WBD team rolled out a plan to promote “Barbie” across all of the company’s platforms, even ones that wouldn’t immediately be associated with the Mattel doll — like TNT’s coverage of the NBA playoffs and digital integration on websites like CNN.com and Bleacher Report.

Promotion was also set for TV networks from the Discovery side of the merged company, including an HGTV competition miniseries called “Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge” and an episode of Food Network’s “Summer Baking Championship” that featured a Barbie-themed challenge. These and other Discovery network promos featured clips from the film and pink versions of the network logos.

Then there was the tidal wave of co-branding that Mattel rolled out with countless companies in the lead-up to the film’s release, from Pinkberry frozen yogurt to a Malibu mansion transformed into a real-life Barbie dreamhouse.

And along with all that, Warner Bros. pushed forward with a traditional tentpole marketing campaign that felt anything but traditional. A glitzy press tour with photoshoots that included a pink convertible and Margot Robbie showing off outfits inspired by Barbie’s history. Ryan Gosling discussed how to best show off your “Kenergy” in YouTube interviews and featurettes, and Warner Bros. showed off more clips of the film’s self-aware jokes about Barbie, including Gosling’s showstopping song “I’m Just Ken.”

The pink details aside, none of this is new to modern Hollywood. Disney has made it a strategy for years to promote its upcoming films through every available option in its portfolio, from ESPN to its streaming services and theme parks. NBCUniversal has touted this “all-in” strategy for years as well, giving it the moniker “Symphony.”

But this is the first time that we have seen it be done successfully by Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery team after a year in which he and his company have taken plenty of hits in the entertainment industry.

The list is long and well documented: a bumpy relaunch of the Max streaming service, running damage control after industry outrage over the layoffs of several key Turner Classic Movies executives, the turbulent rise and fall of former CNN head Chris Licht, multiple DC superhero movies flopping at the box office, and Zaslav himself joining the likes of Bob Iger and Ted Sarandos as the biggest targets of thousands of upon thousands of writers and actors that have gone on strike.

But just a month after “The Flash” became one of Warner’s biggest bombs of all time, “Barbie” is set to become one of its biggest hits ever, thanks in good part to a campaign that the studio and its parent company executed even as the aforementioned catastrophes unfolded.

“‘Barbie’ is an example of Hollywood doing everything right,” said Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock. “Women are often left underserved by summer tentpoles, and here is a movie based on one of the most famous toys ever and which is extremely easy to market with bright pink ads and references to Barbie toys.”

But as both Bock and Warner insiders pointed out, all that ultra-pink marketing wouldn’t work if the film itself didn’t deliver the goods, and it is Gerwig’s comedic voice, delivered through her ensemble cast that turned “Barbie” into a cultural phenomenon that made millions of people not only want to see the film, but to show up to theaters dressed up in their best pink outfits.

And that may be the biggest lesson that summer 2023 yields about where Hollywood needs to go moving forward. As Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” prepare to become hits for both theaters and their respective studios rather than just the former, one of the few other films this season that also did that is Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” the end to a trilogy of films from director (and new DC Studios co-CEO) James Gunn that took a group of obscure comic book characters and turned them into cinematic icons thanks to a unique filmmaking voice.

“If we can’t have truly original films, at least get filmmakers that can turn this IP into something fresh and with a distinct style,” said Bock. “These IP-based films like ‘Barbie’ can become huge hits if you let the filmmaker have a voice. The audience will respond to that! Isn’t that what we’ve always valued in movies?”

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