Barbie-Oppenheimer Splitscreen

About

Barbie-Oppenheimer Splitscreen is a spliced image of Margot Robbie wearing a white cowboy hat and pink outfit in the 2023 Barbie movie and a black-and-white photo of Cillian Murphy wearing a fedora and suit in the 2023 film Oppenheimer edited to evenly align the two stars. The photoshopped image became an exploitable meme template on Twitter and Instagram in June 2023, trending alongside the Barbie vs. Oppenheimer series of memes.

Origin

On June 22nd, 2022, the Daily Mail^[1] published an article showing behind-the-scene photos from the Barbie film set. The collection included a photo in which Margot Robbie can be seen wearing a pink cowboy suit and hat while smiling and looking down (seen below).

The image of Cillian Murphy on the Oppenheimer^[2] set was released by Universal Pictures in November 2022 (seen below).

The earliest known upload of the meme that splices the above two images is a Twitter^[3] post made by user @Dhanush747 on May 28th, 2023. The post gathered over 64,000 likes in a month (seen below). The image was then reposted to the subreddit /r/Moviescirclejerk^[4] on June 7th, 2023, where it gathered over 3,000 likes in a month.

Spread

On June 12th, 2023, Twitter^[5] user @LightsCameraPod posted the image with the text "There are two wolves inside you." The post gathered over 1,000 likes and was reposted by @inkbugfic^[6] on June 23rd, gathering 25,000 likes in a week (seen below).

On June 28th, Twitter^[7] user @xiu_shoegaze posted a version of the meme that showed Venezuelan musician Arca's 2021 album Kick IIII placed over the Barbie tile, and the Aphex Twin album Select Ambient Works placed on the Oppenheimer tile. The post gathered over 8,000 likes in three days (seen below, left). On June 30th, Twitter^[8] user @leftttodecay then replicated the meme format with two Nine Inch Nails albums, gathering over 10,000 likes in a day (seen below, right).

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References