The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola has hailed the box office success of Barbie and Oppenheimer as the beginning of a new “golden age” of original filmmaking.

The five-time Academy Award winner, who was one of the leading lights of the New Hollywood era of the 1970s, an era that included many original films now considered all-time classics, has been critical of the glut of superhero films in recent years.

However, the success of Greta Gerwig’s doll-based satire and Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb epic make the legendary filmmaker hopeful for the future.

Although he has yet to see either film, he told fans asking questions on Instagram Stories, “I have yet to see them, but the fact that people are filling big theaters to see them and that they are neither ‘sequels’ nor ‘prequels’…no number attached to them meaning they are true one-off’s is victory for Cinema.”

Asked where he saw cinema in 10 years, the 84-year-old expressed optimism, saying: “My hunch is that we’re on the verge of a golden age wonderfully illuminating cinema seen in large theatres.”

Cinemagoers’ desire to see the two movies prompted the fourth-biggest weekend in box office history, with thousands booking tickets to see the two movies as an unusual double bill dubbed ‘Barbenheimer’. Between them, after just two weeks in cinemas, the pair have earned more than $1.1 billion worldwide.

Coppola is himself returning to filmmaking after an absence of more than a decade, with Megalopolis, starring Adam Driver, expected to debut next year.

– Cover Media