Barbie Survey Reveals 20% of Audience Hadn’t Been to a Movie Theater Since Before Pandemic

Barbie is currently thriving at the box office. It’s already beaten multiple records, including being the first film directed solely by a woman to reach $1 billion. It only took 17 days in theaters for Barbie to hit this impressive milestone, and new data suggests a lot of people picked the Greta Gerwig-directed film as their first theatrical experience since the pandemic shut down theaters in 2020. The Quorum surveyed 1,800 people who bought tickets to Barbie and found that 11% “couldn’t remember the last film they had seen in a theater” while another 11% revealed that Barbie was their first outing to the movies since the pandemic hit. 

Variety points out that those numbers suggest 22% of Barbie moviegoers skipped last year’s biggest box office hits, Avatar: The Way of the Water and Top Gun: Maverick. The James Cameron-directed film scored $2,320,250,28 billion at the worldwide box office and the Tom Cruise sequel earned $1,495,696,292. Currently, Barbie has made $1,076,809,000. 

Interestingly, 40% of the people surveyed at Barbie said the experience reminded them of how much they loved going to the movies whereas only 15% said, “I don’t think seeing Barbie means I will start seeing more movies in a theater. This was a one-off experience.” 45% said they would like to go to the theater to see movies more often, but the price is a problem. 

Margot Robbie Predicts Barbie‘s Box Office Success:

“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,” Barbie star Margot Robbie previously told Collider. “And then I gave a series of examples like, “dinosaurs and [Steven] Spielberg,” that and that, that and that – 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?!”

What Is Barbie About?

In Barbie, to live in Barbie Land is to be a perfect being in a perfect place. Unless you have a full-on existential crisis. Or you’re a Ken. From Oscar-nominated writer/director Greta Gerwig comes Barbie, which hit theaters on July 21st. Barbie stars Oscar-nominees Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, alongside America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Michael Cera, Ariana Greenblatt, Issa Rae, Rhea Perlman, and Will Ferrell. The film also stars Ana Cruz Kayne, Emma Mackey, Hari Nef, Alexandra Shipp, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Simu Liu, Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans, Jamie Demetriou, Connor Swindells, Sharon Rooney, Nicola Coughlan, Ritu Arya, Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Dua Lipa and Oscar-winner Helen Mirren. Gerwig directed Barbie from a screenplay by Gerwig & Oscar nominee Noah Baumbach, based on Barbie by Mattel.