Is 'Wickediator' Barbenheimer 2.0? Or are we all going insane?

Barbenheimer is back, baby. And this time, it's all green.

At least, that's what some overly confident movie studios would have us believe. Because almost exactly one year after the unlikely success of the same-day debut of Barbie (Greta Gerwig's rose-coloured film about Mattel's iconic doll overthrowing the patriarchy) and Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan's look at the inventor of the atomic bomb), there's a new mismatched double feature in town. And it's called … "Wickediator." Or maybe "Glicked." Or, perhaps, it's — three syllables, everyone — "Gla-dic-ked?"

Then again, maybe not. 

"These things can happen," said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst with box office company ComScore. "But to me, this one — I don't want to throw a wet towel on it, but somebody has got to come up with a name."

The name springs from the attempted mashing-up of Ridley Scott's Gladiator II (sequel to the 2001 story of, you guessed it, feuding Roman gladiators) with Jon Chu's adaptation of the musical Wicked (an alternate history of The Wizard of Oz's witches good and evil, hailing from various cardinal directions).

And, earlier this week, the latter shifted its release date to Nov. 22, when Gladiator II was already set to premiere, putting the two on a collision course.

But it's one with some big potential rewards: a repeat of the biggest movie-marketing coup in recent memory, one that catapulted both Barbie and Oppenheimer to astronomical profits and a bevy of awards. In their opening weekend, the two pulled in roughly $244.5 million US together, eventually landing at nearly $1 billion US in the domestic U.S. box office, something Dergarabedian said would likely not have happened had they not been paired in the public consciousness.

"We're always going to be manufacturing it in the wake of Barbenheimer," he said of the now-entrenched phenomenon. "I mean, this is, like, the most coveted thing, but you can't manufacture it."

The hype machine for the Barbenheimer revival has already begun. In fact, it's more than begun — Wicked was originally scheduled to release the same day as Moana 2, birthing its own uniquely unfortunate portmanteau: "Moaned." 

The urge to identify and label new double-billing mashups, Dergarabedian said, comes both from audience members wanting to relive the communal experience of pink-tinged porkpie hats, and distributors aware of its potential effect. 

Shifting big-ticket releases — often with budgets that run over $100 million US — to come out on the same day is likely not a primary strategy for studios. But, in the face of less desirable outcomes, it can be a potential silver-bullet solution.

"Clearly, the studios knew, when they did that, that this would happen," he said. "I don't think at all they did it because of that.

"But they knew if we put two huge, high-profile movies on the same date right ahead of Thanksgiving, people are going to notice — and they're going to try and mash up the titles, and make something out of it."

The primary challenge is that Barbenheimer's success was organic — something that's next to impossible to recreate.