No Barbenheimer: ‘Glicked’ fails to match last year’s blockbuster mash-up

The ‘Wicked’ and ‘Gladiator 2’ double-bill may not have lived up to 2023’s Barbenheimer hype, but it still managed to breathe life back into a struggling box office

Wicked and Gladiator 2 have debuted with an astounding $169.5 million in combined US ticket sales, making the past weekend a huge success for a struggling box office.

Jon M. Chu’s screen adaptation of the popular Broadway musical, starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, defied gravity raking in $114 million. Meanwhile, Ridley Scott’s belated Gladiator sequel, led by Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal, brought in $55.5 million.

With both opening in U.S. theaters on November 22, the Internet sought to recreate the magic of last summer’s Barbeinheimer — Barbie and Oppenheimer — hype, dubbing the new mash-up, “Glicked.”

“If it has a similar effect to what it did for Barbie and Oppenheimer, it would be amazing,” Mescal, who stars as Lucius in Gladiator II, recently told Entertainment Tonight. Erivo and Grande also embraced the idea, telling the outlet: “We like Glicked day.”

Although Glicked’s box office numbers are certainly nothing to scoff at, they don’t manage to live up to the record-breaking $244 million Barbeinheimer opened to last summer.

Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-nominated Barbie alone debuted to the tune of $162.5 million, nearly as much as Glicked’s total. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer opened with $82.4 million, bringing Barbenheimer’s combined opening box office total to $244.9 million domestically.

Glicked has failed to reinvent the same Barbenheimer buzz (Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures)

At the end of its run in theaters, Barbie managed to rake in $1.4 billion globally, and Oppenheimer earned $974.06 million.

So, while both Wicked and Gladiator 2 have at least a few more weeks until they leave theaters, it’s safe to say their worldwide box office totals won’t come near that of Barbenheimer.

The reason for this, it appears, is that people are becoming tired of the attempts to reinvent Barbenheimer. David Hancock, a media and entertainment analyst at Omdia, told The Guardian: “It isn’t a double bill. Gladdington was also tried, and didn’t set alight, because it seemed forced and derivative.”

Barbenheimer, he reminded the outlet, came together organically: “It was a particular moment [in the recovery of cinema], at a particular time [summer] with particular films [they both were original scripts].”

Still, Wicked’s box office performance broke records of its own, as it easily became the biggest launch for any Broadway adaptation of all time. Into the Woods, which opened to $31 million in 2014, was the previous record holder.

The critics, too, have been raving about both films, with The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey praising Wicked as “fun and well acted” and Gladiator 2 as “thrilling.”