Life just hasn't been the same since I realized that Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer both premiere on the same date. July 21, 2023 is destined to go down in filmic history as the day that moviegoers were forced to choose between seeing a gritty thriller based on the man who helped birth the atomic bomb and a himbofied Ryan Gosling.
Then again, why choose? It's not about picking a winner, really, but about celebrating the fact that two grossly unrelated movies inexplicably share a release date.
That is the duality of man, my friends, and it's now epitomized in a T-shirt.
After tinkering with a few different designs, enterprising Twitter user @NotoraEnt hit upon the perfect mash-up of the Barbie and Oppenheimer logos, juxtaposing each film's name and release date across a bi-color T-shirt that was perfectly positioned for virality.
And viral it went, inspiring at least one other person to actually bring the T-shirt to life a few days later.
This, of course, only brought fresh attention to the fact that, yes, Barbie and Oppenheimer actually do premiere in theaters on the same day.
Someone get Warner Bros. (Barbie) and Universal (Oppenheimer) on the horn: they're literally losing money by not selling this thing themselves. Literally.
The good news is that where there's a will (for money), there's a way.
Don't be fooled by all the bots shilling fakes in Twitter replies — what ever happened to King Elon killing all the bots on Twitter, BTW? — the only legitimate Barbie/Oppenheimer crossover (Barb-enheimer?) T-shirt is being sold by the person who dreamed this thing up themselves.
The bad news is that the pre-order for the Barbie/Oppenheimer T-shirt almost immediately sold out.
That's quite an achievement — not even the biggest streetwear brand on the planet can get people this excited these days.
Then again, it's worthy celebrating that, for some reason, whatever algorithm/astrology chart/tea leaves/room full of apes throwing darts at a novelty wall-sized calendar that the film studios use to plan release dates has coincidentally placed Barbie and Oppenheimer's premieres on the same day.
Maybe celebrating is the wrong word but it's worth an acknowledgement at least. So much so that there's actually more than one Barbie/Oppenheimer mash-up T-shirt.
What better way to acknowledge a truly historic day in cinemá history than a novelty T-shirt that will only be funny for a few weeks?
