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Christopher Nolan reveals why ‘Oppenheimer’ success is “encouraging”

Fri 2 February 2024 9:20, UK

The esteemed British filmmaker Christopher Nolan has discussed why he thinks the success of his 2023 movie Oppenheimer is “encouraging” for the industry.

The movie gained a marketing boost coinciding with the release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, leading fans to coin the word Barbenheimer. The Cillian Murphy-starring epic has earned $958million worldwide to date, making it the highest-grossing biographical drama in film history.

“Everybody has a tendency to talk down the movie business,” Nolan said on the Countdown to the Baftas podcast. “Really, for the whole time I think I’ve been working in movies, I felt the sort of cultural establishment always predicting the demise of movie theatres. Now I get asked that question, you know, ‘What do I think about the health of the movie business?’ I don’t really know how to respond.”

From Nolan’s perspective, there’s not too much to grumble about. “We just released a three-hour, R-rated film about quantum physics and it made a billion dollars. Like what? Obviously, our view is that the audience is there, and they’re excited to see something new,” he said.

“The success of Oppenheimer certainly points to a sort of post-franchise, post-IP landscape for movies … It’s kind of encouraging,” Nolan added. “It reminds the studios that there is an appetite for something people haven’t seen before or an approach to things that people haven’t seen before,” Nolan added.

With the success of Oppenheimer and a comparatively underwhelming reaction to superhero movies like The Flash and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, it seems that Nolan may have a point.

“Something like Oppenheimer working gives other filmmakers a point of reference for how something can work in the marketplace that the studio can relate to,” the director added.

Listen to Nolan’s appearance on the Countdown to the Baftas podcast below.