Barbie celebrates $1BILLION worldwide grossing with another weekend at the box office…when Greta Gerwig becomes the first solo female director to helm a billion-dollar movie

Barbie continued to stretch her long legs and topped the box office for the third week in a row.

The adventure fantasy starring Margo Robbie as the title character and Ryan Gosling as her go-to guy Ken made $53 million at the domestic box office this weekend.

Worldwide, the film has raked in an astonishing $1 billion, just behind The Super Mario Bros Movie (1.4B), but well ahead of traditional blockbusters like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 ($845.3 million), Fast X ($704.7 million), and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ($683.8 million), according to Box office Mojo.

Barbie director Greta Gerwig, 40, now holds the distinction of being the first solo female director to have a film cross the billion-dollar mark.

Taking second place this week was horror-thriller sequel Meg 2: The Trench.

The deep-sea adventure starring Jason Statham and Jing Wu as members of an underwater expedition who encounter multiple monsters while investigating a dangerous mining operation took a big bite out of ticket sales and made $30 million.

Oppenheimer dropped to third place just behind the new film.

Calculations for the historical drama starring Cillian Murphy as “the father of the atomic bomb,” Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and Robert Downey Jr. were equal to $28.7 million.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came in fourth.

Written by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and director Jeff Row, the animated action-adventure went on to compete and took in $28 million, which was a significant domestic gross for the film’s first weekend, costing only about $70 million. .

The Haunted Mansion had an eerie drop, going from third to fifth.

The comedy based on the Disney park experience starring Rosario Dawson, LaKeith Stanfield and Owen Wilson suffered a 62 percent drop, making just $8.97 million in its second week.

Sound of Freedom dropped from fourth to sixth.

The independent film starring Jim Caviezel as a former government agent who works to save children from sex trafficking grossed just over $7 million.

Slate reported that the film has driven strong ticket sales through a pay-it-forward type of marketing where Caviezel speaks to the audience via video at the end of the show suggesting that they buy tickets in advance for their friends while they are still in being the theatre.

Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One finished squarely in seventh place.

The espionage adventure starring Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson and Ving Rhames parachuted with a total of $6.45 million.

Talk to Me has made its mark at number eight.

The alien thriller about a group of friends who can conjure ghosts using embalmed, hand-filled chairs at a cost of $6.27 million.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is still unearthing box office treasures.

The fifth and supposed final film in the popular franchise, starring Harrison Ford as the intrepid explorer, bagged $1.5 million and ranked 9th.

Rounding out the top 10 is Disney’s Elemental.

The Pixar story about a city where air, fire, water, and land people learn that it’s okay to be friends with different types of people earning $1.2 million in revenue.

2023 has been a good year for the film greenhouse

The total weekend total was an estimated $178 million, pushing the domestic box office over $6 billion for the January to August period.

That was an increase of 22 percent from the same period last year, the paper said deadline.

Red White and Royal Blue, a bromance involving the US president’s son and a British prince, premieres next week, along with the horror film The Last Voyage of the Demeter.