What Barbenheimer teaches us about the pointlessness of rivalry

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The phrase “know your enemy” is generally synonymous with the importance of keeping tabs on the competition, whether by simply sampling your rival’s product or by more nefarious means such as espionage. But another, less frequently used meaning is just as important: correctly identifying who your rivals actually are.

That’s the act of corporate genius that saw the marketing and creative teams behind Oppenheimer and Barbie embrace the light-hearted meme about these two divergent films sharing a release date. Not only did it see more than 200,000 people in the US buy tickets for both films on the same day, it also increased the amount of free media that both received.

Although not much connects a brilliant, three-hour polemic about the nuclear bomb with a witty, self-referential comedy on a children’s doll, the fact that mention of one has been largely accompanied by mention of the other has given them a greater level of prominence. It’s part of why the pair managed an opening weekend box office performance hitherto reserved for the biggest of the Marvel movies and other established film franchises.

The studios’ coup lay in realising that, while plenty of people will see both films, they are not, in any meaningful sense, competing with one another. There are certainly lessons here for film. An ill-conceived sense of who is and isn’t a rival, has seen many production companies set up their own streaming services, spending vast sums on new content to attract subscribers. Initiatives like Lionsgate Plus or Disney’s decision to rush new releases from the cinema (a model with a clear path to profit) to streaming (which is not yet proven) will surely endure as symbols of the excesses brought about by near-zero interest rates. But how much sense do they make as commercial strategies? Ironically, they fail to internalise the most important lesson from Netflix, whose founder Reed Hastings once named his major competitor as “sleep”.

But the lessons of “Barbenheimer” apply far more broadly than entertainment. Politicians today would also be well-served by thinking very seriously about who their competitors actually are. In France, the various political parties, other than the far-right National Rally, might jostle for power but, come the second round, the “republican front” has recognised the difference between competitor and enemy. Now that old understanding is fraying, which could result in disaster for both France and Europe.

In the US, the “No Labels” centrist group has convinced themselves that their most important competitors are the daft ideas that can be found in both political parties. But while Democrats certainly have no shortage of eccentric beliefs, a victory for Joe Biden is extremely unlikely to prevent centrists from clawing back power at a subsequent election. A victory for Donald Trump just might.

In the UK, Rishi Sunak seizes on whatever dividing line he can find with Keir Starmer, including the latter’s willingness to build on the greenbelt. But Sunak’s biggest enemy isn’t Starmer: it’s the country’s sluggish growth rates. Even if he is able to pull off a remarkable turnaround in Tory fortunes, he will do so at the cost of further limiting his own ability to deliver the policies he wants: such as teaching maths to 18, an admirable aim which cannot possibly be met without finding some way to increase the amount of money in the education budget. He surely can’t do that without increasing sluggish growth, and part of the solution there is to abandon the dysfunctional planning regime. All too often, Sunak is a Lionsgate Plus politician: what he does makes sense as part of a contest with his opposite number, but as an overall strategy it has a hole in it.

Most of us, of course, are not considering how to hold off Marine Le Pen in France or protect the rules-based order in the US or boost the UK’s sluggish growth. But the “Barbenheimer principle” — that you should remember that the people you superficially compete with aren’t the biggest threat to you — holds true almost everywhere.

In our romantic lives, our rivals aren’t every attractive person our partners might happen across in work or at play. It’s a general sense of drift or neglect. In our professional lives, we aren’t really in direct competition with our internal rivals. It’s our ability to make more sales or more discoveries or more entertainment that drives how we do. All too often, we end up in pointless acts of intrigue against our supposed “rivals” rather than working on the real obstacles to success.

stephen.bush@ft.com