With 13 nominations apiece for the Oscars and the BAFTAs, “Oppenheimer” looks to be the awards season favorite. But director Christopher Nolan thinks his latest film may end up being more than that. In fact, Deadline reports that Nolan thinks “Oppenheimer” may usher in a sea change in cinematic culture that changes Hollywood for the better.
“I think the success of “Oppenheimer” certainly points to a sort of post franchise, post intellectual property, landscape for movies — it’s kind of encouraging,” Nolan told the awards season podcast “Countdown To The BAFTAs,” hosted by Alex Zane. Along with its critical acclaim, nominations, and $953 worldwide gross at the box office, Nolan thinks his latest film also shows “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.”
“Everybody has a tendency to talk down the movie business,” Nolan continued. “For the whole time I’ve been working in movies, I felt the cultural establishment was always predicting the demise of movie theaters, and I now get asked that question: ‘what do I think about the health of the movie business?’ And I don’t really know how to respond. 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 excited to see something new.”
Let’s break down this argument for a second. Is Nolan really considering that a three-hour biopic is something groundbreaking? R-rating and quantum physics aside, “Oppenheimer” doesn’t deviate very much from the genre’s usual modus operandi. Sure, J. Robert Oppenheimer is a polarizing, somewhat esoteric figure to make a biopic for, but Nolan keeps his narrative conventional as far as biopics go. Yes, its stakes are huge, its scope massive, and its burrowing into Oppenheimer’s psyche immersive, but “Oppenheimer” doesn’t break new ground formally speaking. It’s impressive, even audacious, and a surprising success at the box office, but it doesn’t reinvent the wheel. So what new landscape is Nolan pointing to, exactly?
Of course, Nolan’s comments sound hopeful for an updated movie culture that embraces films like “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” more readily: original productions not affiliated with tired IP and franchises. But that’s also what most of film history is already, anyway. Sure, the past couple of decades of Hollywood filmmaking has been inundated with the MCU, superhero movies, and myriad reboots. But creative ingenuity is what made film noir, ’70s studio films, and classic Hollywood productions so esteemed and memorable. It may be in short supply right now, but it’s not a perennial paucity in moviemaking. And “Oppenheimer” certainly isn’t the gold standard in creative innovation either, impressive though it may be.
But maybe Nolan’s argument deserves less criticism. In the short term, the success of “Oppenheimer” could indeed usher in a new golden era in filmmaking that does away with tired franchises and superhero fatigue. Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air? After all, making “Oppenheimer” at Universal was one for Nolan. “It was the first time that we’d sort of gone out to a lot of different studios with a project in a while,” Nolan said about making the movie. “It’s an exciting process. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking to show people your script and see what they think. But we had a great response to it. A lot of people seemed interested in making it, and that was a great position to be in.”
Nolan also championed his film for being successful despite its long runtime. “Just as we were able to point to “Avengers: Endgame” as an unlikely running time for such an incredibly successful film. 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,” he said. Again, a three-hour runtime isn’t exactly a groundbreaking proposition for a director to make for their audience: movies that long aren’t uncommon, and Martin Scorsese‘s “Killers Of The Flower Moon” is 26 minutes longer than that. But Nolan is focused more on his film’s success with the general population despite (and because of) its length and formal content. If a movie as heady and serious as “Oppenheimer” could succeed as well as it did with its R-rating, runtime, and subject matter, who’s to say similarly minded films couldn’t also win over audiences?
It’s something to consider as Hollywood navigates superhero movie fatigue and Marvel Studios‘ potential fall from grace. If “Oppenheimer” cleans up at the Oscars and the BAFTAs, maybe a surplus of long, serious, R-rated dramas will become the new normal in theaters over the next decade. For some movie fans, that would be a dream come true, but it remains to be seen if that dream will become a reality.