Margot Robbie says she had high hopes when she started pitching a Barbie movie to studios. The star and producer of Greta Gerwig’s new movie based on the Mattel doll said she felt the movie could make $1 billion at the box office.
"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," Robbie tells Collider. "And then I gave a series of examples like, 'Dinosaurs and [Steven] Spielberg' – 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?"
While $1 billion at the box office is still a long way off, it is not out of the realm of possibility. Barbie’s impressive marketing campaign has created a lot of buzz for the Margot Robbie-led movie and resulted in some impressive tracking numbers too.
Currently, its opening weekend is looking like it might make between $95 and $110 million (H/T Variety), but some exhibitors have been saying this is a conservative estimate. Deadline reports it could be as high as $130 million for its opening, which would be the best pre-sales since Avatar: The Way of Water.
However, some forecasters have suggested one difficulty may be the Asia market. Box Office analyst Luiz Fernando said screenings in Korea and China have not been seeing the same tracking numbers.
It seems like it will be a waiting game to see just how well Barbie does, and how that compares to Oppenheimer which releases on the same day on July 21. For more on Barbie, the Inside Total Film podcast spoke to director Gerwig about a potential sequel and how she’s planning to tackle the Chronicles of Narnia next.
