From blockbusters to besties to Best Picture nominees: Lessons learned from 'Barbenheimer'

—Directors are brands

There are big, big stars in both "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer." But they're both director-forward projects, closely identified by and with their filmmakers.

"Barbie" is only Greta Gerwig's third film as a director, but her previous works, 2017's "Lady Bird" and 2019's "Little Women," established her as a distinct voice for her generation, an appointment-viewing director.

Christopher Nolan has been one of Hollywood's top directors for more than two decades, but his reputation as today's top commercially successful visionary really coalesced around "Oppenheimer."

Both films take on huge, culturally relevant subjects — an iconic doll in one, the nuclear bomb in the other — as filtered through the minds of their directors, which, as much as anything else on screen, became chief selling points to ticket buyers.

—People want real

Special effects have made anything and everything possible in the movies, but today's blockbusters are often rendered as a haze of computer-generated imagery that, after awhile, all begins to look like digital vomit.

"Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" are largely movies filmed on sets and locations that are tactile, tangible and real, made with elements you can reach out and touch.

The sets in "Barbie," especially, are physical throwbacks to the movies of yore, and the production reportedly used so much pink paint that it created a worldwide shortage.

Those images could have easily been created on a computer, but it wouldn't have looked the same, and more importantly, it wouldn't have felt the same to viewers. The warmth that people reacted to in the movie had a lot to do with its hand-crafted nature.

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