‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon helps the bottom line at The Flicks in Boise | Opinion

My wife and I “Barbenheimed” on Saturday at The Flicks. That is, we watched the movies “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” consecutively.

Granted, we didn’t Barbenheim on opening weekend, but we still feel like we earned a badge of honor. After all, “Barbie” is two hours long, and “Oppenheimer” is three hours long. We were at The Flicks for more than six hours, from about 1:30 to 7:30 p.m.

I’m not going to turn into Roger Ebert here and give you my review. All I’ll say is that both movies were phenomenal. Go see them both, even if you don’t Barbenheim.

And go see them both at The Flicks, which, since 1984, has been Boise’s locally owned independent movie theater.

When we saw “Barbie” for the 1:45 p.m. show, The Flicks was hopping. Young people, old people, little girls wearing pink, moms wearing pink. Theater 1, the largest at The Flicks, was pretty full. I actually had to sit next to a complete stranger!

“It’s been really, really good,” Carole Skinner, owner of The Flicks, told me in a phone interview. “You know, we were still in the hole from the pandemic, and it’s really helping us climb back out. It’s busy in the way it used to be before the pandemic, and so it feels wonderfully familiar, in a good way.”

Skinner said The Flicks has seen similar big hits in the past, such as when “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The Wrestler” opened the same weekend, when “The English Patient” was running and especially when the line at The Flicks was around the block for “A River Runs Through It.”

But this is certainly the best two weeks The Flicks has had since 2018, she said.

‘Barbenheimer’ bump

The Barbenheimer phenomenon is just that — a phenomenon.

“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” earned a combined $235 million in ticket sales in opening weekend, July 21-23, according to The Associated Press. “Barbie” raked in $155 million during its first three days in theaters, and “Oppenheimer” earned $80.5 million in ticket sales during the same period.

“Barbie” had the biggest opening of the year and set a first-weekend record for a film directed by a woman. It was the first time that one movie opened to more than $100 million and another movie opened to more than $80 million in the same weekend, according to AP.

Combined, so far, the movies have had more than $1.1 billion in global ticket sales since July 21, according to CNBC.

What’s more, “Barbenheimer” is stimulating the economy, based on a spike in credit card spending, according to CNN.

When my wife and I lived in Rochester, New York, before we had kids, we used to go every Monday to The Little Theater, a small independent theater just like The Flicks. (The Little is also showing “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”) When we moved to Idaho in 2006, we couldn’t believe our great fortune to find another independent theater just like it.

My wife and I tend to prefer the independent “films” that The Flicks shows, as opposed to the latest comic book blockbuster that seems to get churned out every couple of months.

We loved, for example, the recent films “Tar” and “Past Lives.” We loved Wes Anderson’s latest, “Asteroid City,” which is still playing at The Flicks.

Although we didn’t love love it, we enjoyed watching the latest Indiana Jones flick, also at The Flicks.

But what’s the deal with showing the Indiana Jones movie, not exactly your arthouse independent film?

“That doesn’t mean we’re going to be playing things with explosions and car chases,” Skinner said. “Quality is the goal, right?”

Fortunately, films like “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” hit both marks of quality and box office success.

Skinner points out that “Barbie” co-writers Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach are “indie filmmakers, have that indie mindset.”

“Even though this movie is a big Hollywood movie, it’s still Greta Gerwig and her sensibility and Noah Baumbach who co-wrote it with her,” Skinner said, adding that The Flicks has shown all of Gerwig’s and Baumbach’s movies. “So I knew that it would be for our audience, even if some people would not have suspected that.”

Even though “Barbie” is turning out to be a box office blockbuster, it’s still a good fit for The Flicks’ audience, Skinner said.

“That’s our mission: independent, foreign and art films and the best of Hollywood,” Skinner said. “So I feel like I have the latitude to choose films that I think our audience will like and that I want to see, which is really the bottom line.”

And the bottom line, thanks in part to the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, is looking good.