Last summer, the same-day premieres of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer hit movie theaters across the country like a tsunami. The twin releases, dubbed “Barbenheimer,” scored big at the box office, with Barbie bringing in $162 million in domestic sales on opening weekend, and the R-rated Oppenheimer bringing in $82 million domestically that same weekend as moviegoers flooded into theaters to be a part of the phenomenon.

Nitehawk Cinema’s Prospect Park theater in Brooklyn’s Park Slope was no exception. According to workers at the independent dine-in theater, one of two locations (the other is in Williamsburg, Brooklyn), they were exceptionally busy during the first weeks of Barbenheimer’s release.

“We got an email from management forwarding what Warner Brothers had said, which is that we were one of the top-performing theaters in the entire country,” Alana Liu Moskowitz, a server at Nitehawk Prospect Park, said. The August 2023 email, viewed by Jacobin, notes that the twin opening made for the largest weekend in Nitehawk’s twelve-year history. (The Williamsburg location opened in 2011, the Park Slope location in 2018).