This weekend, the movies belong to dolls and doom.

It’s the cinematic event of the summer: Greta Gerwig’s splashy pink romp “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “emotionally devastating” three-hour epic “Oppenheimer” rolled out in theaters this week. Aside from their prestige-y creative teams, the films have little in common, but dedicated cinephiles are devoting a full day of their lives to both. (“Barbie” is being released by Warner Bros., which shares parent company Warner Bros. Discovery with CNN.)

It’s the “Barbenheimer” double feature, and it started its life, as most phenomena do, as a meme. But as more people tweeted fan-made posters of Margot Robbie’s Barbie smiling in front of a mushroom cloud, the idea of a day spent at the movies started to sound like a good idea. (AMC said this week that 40,000 moviegoers already bought tickets to see both films on the same day — double the number it reported last week.)

It’s a gambit that some industry pundits hope could give the movie business a much-needed boost after earlier summer releases saw less-than-stellar box office returns. It’s also, perhaps, a necessity, as the Earth warms to historic highs and people grow restless in the dangerous heat. But leave the musings on death and destruction to the eponymous stars of both films.

Read up here on the quintessential way to do a “Barbenheimer” double feature, from selecting showtimes to filling the space between the two films to navigating the wide range of emotions both films will elicit. A hint — definitely leave “Barbie” for last.