Barbie v. Oppenheimer Isn’t the First Big Matchup Between Polar Opposite Movies

Back in 2008, not only did we have a Nolan epic released against a woman-directed film that skewed toward a female demographic, but we had an almost identical division of film interests dropped by the same studios, only Nolan was then at WB, and Mamma Mia! was the Universal release. In the aftermath, two stone cold classics leapt (and skipped, and cha-cha’d, and lip-synched all the words to “Dancing Queen”) into film history.

At the time, this was a traditional but canny move by Universal to release Mamma Mia! opposite another “boys with toys” superhero flick. Just the year prior, the also Meryl Streep-led The Devil Wears Prada opened on the same weekend as Superman Returns. Yet the storied legacy of The Dark Mamma! would be something else altogether grander.

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, Mamma Mia! was viewed by Universal as an attempt to tap into the then nascent return of the movie musical. Just a few years earlier at the beginning of the decade, Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Chicago (2002) brought that long-dormant genre roaring back to BOFFO glory, with Chicago even winning Best Picture at the Oscars and a host of other awards. In the aftermath, there was a gold rush in adapting other Broadway hits like Chicago, with mixed degrees of success. Yet Mamma Mia! had an advantage the likes of Rent (2005) and The Phantom of the Opera (2004) could never hope for: It was a show wallpapered around ABBA music.

Yes, there was also a Mamma Mia! stage musical that played both West End and Broadway, but this show was first and foremost a glittering repackaging of the greatest pop hits of the Swedish supergroup’s globally beloved 1970s pop song catalog. It was the next best thing to seeing an ABBA concert live, and hey, this one came with a story! Also unlike a pricey theater ticket, Mamma Mia! the movie offered the entire ABBA nation around the world the chance to see glitzy movie stars like Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Colin Firth, and, infamously, Pierce Brosnan skip along postcard-perfect Greek islands at sunset, dancing above the crash of the waves as they belted disco standards.

Did it matter if half of them couldn’t actually sing the songs they were assigned? Well, to critics, yes. Absolutely. Brosnan, Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård’s infamously limited vocal range, as well as a few curious choices of staging, made the already lightweight Mamma Mia! a punching bag for mostly male film reviewers. However, the damndest thing about it was… the movie wasn’t made for them.

And the audience it was made for loved Mamma Mia!, which became a kind of wine mom pilgrimage in the summer of 2008, opening at a respectable $28 million in the third weekend of July. It was fractional next to Nolan’s brooding and somber The Dark Knight, which turned Batman and the Joker into allegorical stand-in figures for the War on Terror. But even as The Dark Knight opened at $158.4 million, teeing the Nolan epic up for an extraordinary run at the American box office where it briefly became the second highest-grossing film of all time behind Titanic, it also did not upset the audience at all for Mamma Mia!, which likewise showed up in cinemas week after week, and month after month.