Oppenheimer (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  The teaser for the film Oppenheimer, released on the 28th of July 2022, carried a live countdown to 5:29 a.m. Mountain time on the 16th of July 2023. That hour marked the 78th anniversary of the first detonation of an atomic weapon. Oppenheimer is a biographical thriller written, co-produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan. It follows J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who helped develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II. The film moves from his student years to his direction of the Los Alamos Laboratory and a later government hearing. It draws on a biography that sat without a film for a very long time. Why did it wait so long, and what finally changed? How did a director leave the studio that had long backed him? How did a story about the bomb end up opening on the same day as a movie about a fashion doll? And what did a film this large still choose to leave off the screen?

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• 2. The Book and the Break

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  Sam Mendes was the first director tied to American Prometheus, the 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. His adaptation never materialized. Over the next fifteen years, various filmmakers optioned the book, and the authors grew pessimistic about ever seeing a film. Oliver Stone passed on directing it, saying "I couldn't find my way to its essence".

  In 2015, J. David Wargo optioned the book, then commissioned several scripts and rejected them. During the COVID-19 pandemic he flew to Hollywood to meet the actor James Woods. Woods set up a meeting with Charles Roven, a producer on various Nolan films. Roven then handed a copy of the book to Nolan. Wargo and Woods are both executive producers. Woods has said he was asked not to promote the film, because his outspoken political views risked its commercial success and awards campaign.

  Nolan had wanted to make a film about Oppenheimer even before he read the book. In 2019, as production on Tenet was ending, the actor Robert Pattinson gave him a book of Oppenheimer's speeches. Nolan said they showed a man "wrestling with the implications... of what's happened and what he's done". He wanted to show what it would have been like to be Oppenheimer in those moments.

  In December 2020, Warner Bros. announced that its 2021 films would open in theaters and on HBO Max at the same time. The studio cited the damage the pandemic had done to the film industry. Nolan had partnered with Warner Bros. on every film since Insomnia in 2002, and he was outraged. He was a staunch supporter of traditional film exhibition. He had accepted the same approach for Wonder Woman 1984, saying it was handled properly. But he had been excluded from discussions about the postponed release of Tenet. By mid-2021 he had left the studio and was meeting others.

  Oppenheimer was announced in September 2021, with Cillian Murphy in negotiations to star. Nolan approached Sony, Universal, Paramount, and Apple. According to insiders, Paramount dropped out early after Brian Robbins, an advocate of more streaming releases, replaced Jim Gianopulos as chief executive and chairman. Nolan signed with Universal. Donna Langley, chairwoman of the NBCUniversal studio group, had worked with him on a failed attempt to film the British series The Prisoner. Langley agreed with his stance on traditional exhibition. His terms included a production budget of $100 million, an equal marketing budget, and an exclusive theatrical window of 90 to 120 days. He also secured 20% of the first-dollar gross, plus three weeks before and after opening in which Universal could release no other new film.

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• 3. Writing From Inside

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  Nolan first heard Oppenheimer's name in a lyric from the 1985 Sting song "Russians": "How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?" He grew up during the era of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the anti-nuclear protests at RAF Greenham Common. Nolan felt that "while our relationship with that nuclear fear has ebbed and flowed with time, the threat itself never actually went away". The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, in his view, brought that anxiety back.

  Howard Hughes was the subject of an earlier Nolan script, written around the time Martin Scorsese made The Aviator in 2004. That project taught him how to write about a person's life. Emily Blunt later called the Oppenheimer script emotional and said Nolan had "Trojan-Horsed a biopic into a thriller". By September 2021, Roven and Nolan were contacting Bird and Sherwin about it. Nolan had already drafted a script by Bird's first meeting with him, though he did not share it. He says he wrote the script in only a few months after finishing Tenet, having thought about the subject for over 20 years.

  Oppenheimer is the first screenplay Nolan wrote in the first person, because he wanted the story told from Oppenheimer's perspective. Scenes in color carry most of Oppenheimer's own view. Scenes in black-and-white give a more objective view, seen through another character's eyes. To keep the film as subjective as possible, the team also staged visions of Oppenheimer's picture of the quantum world and of waves of energy. Nolan described his aim as showing how the personal interacts with the historic and the geopolitical, in the form of a cautionary tale.

  Two hearings frame the story. In 1954, after a month-long hearing that taints his past associations, Oppenheimer loses his Q-clearance. Five years later, the Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss, nominated for Commerce Secretary, turns on Strauss's part in that downfall. In the film, Strauss had pursued a personal vendetta after a public conflict over exporting radioactive isotopes. He also resented Oppenheimer's opposition to the hydrogen bomb, and a chat with Einstein at Princeton in which he was ignored. Strauss loses the vote, which ends his political career. In 1963, President Johnson presents Oppenheimer with the Enrico Fermi Award, though he never regains his clearance. Nolan found a model for the two men in the pairing of Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus (1984).

  Nolan noted that Oppenheimer never publicly apologized for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet he believed the physicist felt genuine guilt, and he portrayed it. He wanted to show the affair with Jean Tatlock candidly, because her Communist ties had "enormous ramifications for Oppenheimer's later life and his ultimate fate". The scene in which President Harry S. Truman calls Oppenheimer a "crybaby" was another hinge. Nolan told it from Oppenheimer's side, as a "massive moment of disillusion". He wanted to swing from "the highest triumphalism, the highest high, to the lowest low in the shortest amount of screen time possible". The ending is deliberately open to interpretation, but Nolan intended a "strong set of troubling reverberations".

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• 4. Assembling the Cast

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  Cillian Murphy had worked with Nolan before, and Oppenheimer was their sixth collaboration and the first with Murphy in the lead. Nolan phoned to offer the part, and Murphy accepted with enthusiasm. Nolan then flew to Dublin, where Murphy read the script in his hotel room. Murphy read extensively about Oppenheimer's life and drew inspiration from David Bowie's appearance in the 1970s. He lost an undisclosed amount of weight to match the physicist's gaunt look. Nolan also arranged a call with the Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, who had worked with him on Interstellar in 2014. As a graduate student, Thorne had attended some of Oppenheimer's seminars. He described to Murphy how Oppenheimer guided group discussions of difficult scientific ideas.

  Secrecy surrounded the casting, and some actors did not learn their roles until they signed. Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, and Emily Blunt each took a pay cut, earning $4 million instead of their usual upfront salary of $10-20 million. Downey read the script at Nolan's house, where it was printed in black on red paper. He later called Oppenheimer the best film he had appeared in to date. Years earlier, he had met Nolan about playing Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow, in Batman Begins (2005). Nolan felt Downey was not right for that part, and it went to Murphy.

  Emily Blunt met Nolan in Los Angeles and accepted the role of Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer with enthusiasm. She then called Murphy to find out what working with Nolan would be like. Matt Damon, who had appeared in Interstellar, was taking a break from acting while negotiating with his wife, Luciana Bozán Barroso, in couples therapy. He had reserved one exception: a role offered by Nolan. So he signed on to play Leslie Groves.

  For Edward Teller, Nolan cast the writer-director Benny Safdie, after asking Paul Thomas Anderson about directing him in Licorice Pizza (2021). In high school, Safdie had worked alongside a nuclear physicist at Columbia University. Glen Powell auditioned for the role that went to Josh Hartnett and was rejected. Oppenheimer is also Nolan's first film since Insomnia in 2002 without Michael Caine. For Truman, Nolan turned to Gary Oldman, then on a break from the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses. Oldman was contractually barred from cutting his hair. He told Nolan he could wear a prosthetic cap and wig, or Nolan could find someone else. Oldman took the part, and said he would be on set for a single day in May for "one scene, a page and a half".

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• 5. Practical Fire

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  Pre-production had begun by January 2022 in New Mexico, where a two-day casting call in Santa Fe and Los Alamos sought local residents, military personnel, and scientists to appear on screen. Principal photography began on the 28th of February 2022 at Ghost Ranch, with Hoyte van Hoytema as cinematographer. It lasted 57 days. The original schedule had set aside about 85 days, but that could not fit within $100 million for location work across the United States. Nolan compressed the shoot to protect the budget for sets in New Mexico and locations in California and New Jersey. Murphy, who appears in nearly every scene, called the pace "insane".

  On a 2021 research trip, Nolan found that Los Alamos had changed drastically since the 1940s, and the town's equivalent of a Main Street now has a Starbucks. So the team built a version of 1940s Los Alamos on a similar plateau at Ghost Ranch. The set took three months to build and was used for only six shooting days. Interior shooting began on the 8th of March 2022 inside historic buildings in the real town. Lecture halls were shot in a historic Women's Army Corps dormitory, which saved time and money. Oppenheimer's original cabin, since restored, also appeared on screen. The author Kai Bird visited the set and was impressed by Murphy's performance.

  Many of the film's most important scenes were shot around Los Angeles, a fact the making-of book Unleashing Oppenheimer revealed. UCLA's Kerckhoff Hall stood in for both Cambridge and Göttingen. The Millennium Biltmore Hotel doubled for a San Francisco hotel, for the Plaza Hotel, and for a Washington hotel where Szilard and Hill urge Oppenheimer to sign a petition. The security hearing was shot in a disused office building in Alhambra, and the scene revoking his clearance was filmed there on the 19th of May 2022. Berkeley scenes were filmed in Pasadena, Albuquerque's Old Post Office played a New York hotel, and Santa Fe's state buildings played Washington. In the second week of April, the crew filmed at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The planned Oval Office location in the Nixon Presidential Library fell through a week before filming. Oldman's dates could not move, so the designers redressed the Oval Office set from the HBO series Veep. Production designer Ruth De Jong said it had fallen into "nightmarish" disrepair.

  The Trinity test was built from real explosives rather than computer graphics. When the news broke online, many fans who knew Nolan's taste for in-camera effects assumed he had set off a real atomic bomb. Nolan later called that assumption both "flattering" and "scary". The production won government permission to film at White Sands Missile Range, but only at highly inconvenient hours. So the crew filmed in the desert near Belen, New Mexico. Murphy climbed a 100-foot steel tower, a replica of the original, in rough weather. A special set used gasoline, propane, aluminum powder, and magnesium to create the blast. Special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher called the models "big-atures", because the team built them as large as possible and used forced perspective. Stars, black holes, supernovas, and the interactions of atoms and energy waves were also made by practical methods.

  Nolan filmed his eldest child, his daughter Flora, in a scene where a young woman disintegrates in a nuclear explosion. It appears as one of Oppenheimer's visions, meant to show "that if you create the ultimate destructive power, it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you".

  The film used IMAX 65 mm and 65 mm large-format film. It is the first to shoot sections on IMAX black-and-white film, which Kodak created and FotoKem developed specifically for it. Panavision built a custom probe lens so IMAX cameras could do macro photography of the miniature effects. Miniatures were filmed at 48 frames per second, and those needing higher speed were shot on Super 35 mm film at 150 frames per second.

  Nolan claimed minimal use of computer effects. Yet the company DNEG, on its eighth collaboration with him, produced more than 100 VFX shots from more than 400 practically shot elements. Digital compositing added layers to the Trinity explosion, which was shot from many viewpoints. Of 160 VFX artists on the film, 134 were left uncredited.

  Ludwig Göransson, who scored Tenet, composed the music. Nolan advised a solo violin for Oppenheimer's central theme, and Göransson felt it could shift from the most romantic tone to neurotic, heart-wrenching horror in a split second. He estimates that music plays for at least 2.5 hours, more than 83% of the film's length. Jennifer Lame edited, and she and Nolan did "character passes" to make sure every character registered at the film's fast pace. Steven Spielberg was the first person to see the final cut, at a private screening of its first 70mm print.

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• 6. Barbenheimer

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  Le Grand Rex in Paris hosted the world premiere on Tuesday, the 11th of July 2023. The British premiere followed on the 13th at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square, and the American premiere on the 17th at AMC Lincoln Square 13 in New York. The SAG-AFTRA strike touched both later events. Some actors left the London premiere early, and Universal canceled the red carpet in New York. SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher later claimed the studios had "duped" the guild into a twelve-day extension of negotiations, which kept actors promoting summer films like Oppenheimer.

  Universal released the film on the 21st of July 2023. Formats included IMAX 70 mm on 30 prints, standard 70 mm on 113 prints, and 35 mm on around 80 prints. Warner Bros. opened Barbie the same day. Greta Gerwig directed that fantasy comedy, based on Mattel's Barbie dolls. Many speculated that Warner Bros. chose the date to drain ticket sales from Oppenheimer, in retaliation for Nolan's move to Universal. Social media users instead made memes about how the two films suited different audiences, and urged viewing them as a double feature. The trend was dubbed "Barbenheimer". Murphy endorsed it, saying "My advice would be for people to go see both, on the same day. If they are good films, then that's cinema's gain."

  The week of release, AMC Theatres said that over 40,000 AMC Stubs members had pre-booked tickets to both films on the same day. Oppenheimer took $33 million on its first day, including $10.5 million from Thursday night previews. It went on to open to $82.5 million, second behind Barbie. That was Nolan's best opening for an original film, and the third-highest opening for a biopic behind The Passion of the Christ and American Sniper. Of the audience, 64% was male. Across the weekend, 79% of tickets sold were for the two films, with 27% for Oppenheimer, a combined 18.5 million people.

  A second weekend of $46.2 million, a drop of 44%, kept it behind Barbie. On the 16th of August, it passed Sing (2016) to become the highest-grossing film never to reach number one at the domestic box office. In its sixth weekend it topped the worldwide box office with $38.12 million, passing Barbie for the first time. The final worldwide total was $975.8 million, made up of $330.1 million in the United States and Canada and $645.7 million elsewhere. About $190 million came from IMAX alone. It became the highest-grossing biographical film, passing Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). It also became the highest-grossing World War II film, passing Dunkirk (2017), another Nolan film. The third-highest-grossing R-rated film ever trails only Joker (2019) and Deadpool & Wolverine (2024). Deadline Hollywood calculated a net profit of $201.9 million. As of the 10th of September 2023, the UK ($75 million) and China ($61.6 million) led the territories. After the Oscar nominations, the film expanded from 1,008 theaters to 2,262 in its 28th week and earned $1 million, up 284%.

  In India, the film was released with scenes of nudity, sex, and cigarette smoking censored, earning a U/A certificate and keeping its running time. In some countries in the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, Universal supplied a version in which a computer-generated black dress covered Florence Pugh's nude body. The audio of the scene in which Tatlock has Oppenheimer read the Bhagavad Gita verse "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds" stayed intact. Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur questioned how the censor board had certified it and asked for the scene's deletion. The journalist Uday Mahurkar wrote an open letter to Nolan calling it a "direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus". The actor Nitish Bharadwaj argued the verse reflects a scientist whose mind never leaves his creation. Russia's Ministry of Culture refused to license the film at all, saying it did not serve the aim of "preserving and strengthening traditional Russian spiritual values".

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• 7. Praise and Dissent

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  Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave Oppenheimer an average grade of "A", and PostTrak found a 93% positive score, with 74% saying they would definitely recommend it. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it a perfect four out of four. Matthew Jackson of The A.V. Club called it a "masterpiece" and Nolan's best film so far. Dan Jolin of Empire praised a masterfully constructed character study, noting Murphy's performance and van Hoytema's IMAX cinematography. Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com also gave four out of four, and compared the Oppenheimer and Einstein conversation to "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane. IGN's Siddhant Adlakha gave it 10/10, calling it "a three-hour biopic that plays like a jolting thriller".

  Brian Lowry of CNN thought Nolan juggled too much, to the movie's detriment. Owen Gleiberman of Variety found the first half "mesmerizing" but felt some intensity leak out after the Trinity sequence. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called it a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms, yet found some cameos, including Malek's, distracting. Odie Henderson of The Boston Globe called it "visually stunning but emotionally empty", and said Pugh and Blunt were wasted in underwritten roles. Richard Brody of The New Yorker described it as a "History Channel movie with fancy editing". Brett Mason complained that it ignored British science and the Australian physicist Mark Oliphant, who helped start the quest.

  Oliver Stone, who had once passed on the book, called the film "a classic, which I never believed could be made in this climate". Paul Schrader called it "the best, most important film of this century", and Denis Villeneuve called it "a masterpiece". Steven Soderbergh said it was a real accomplishment and that he was thrilled it was a massive hit. In IndieWire's annual poll of 158 critics and journalists, it placed second for Best Film, with 69 mentions and 17 first-place votes. Van Hoytema's work topped the Best Cinematography list. It appeared on over 410 critics' lists of the best films of 2023 and was ranked first on 99.

  Time added more rankings. Collider placed it third on a list of the best dramas of the 2020s in August 2023. In 2025, IndieWire ranked it number 54 among the best movies of the 2020s so far. The New York Times placed it number 65 on its list of the best movies of the 21st century, and Rolling Stone placed it number 86.

  At the 96th Academy Awards, Oppenheimer earned a leading 13 nominations, the most for any Nolan film. It won seven: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Murphy, Best Supporting Actor for Downey, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score. It also won five Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture - Drama, and seven British Academy Film Awards, including Best Film. Apart from Göransson, every winner was a first-time Oscar winner. That included Nolan, Roven, Downey, and van Hoytema, who had each earned earlier nominations. Murphy became the first Irish-born performer to win Best Actor, and the film became the highest-grossing and longest Best Picture winner since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003.

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• 8. Absences and Corrections

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  Japan did not see Oppenheimer until the 29th of March 2024, eight months after its global release. Variety noted the controversial reputation of the subject there. Universal's Japanese distributor, Toho-Towa, opted not to release it, so the independent distributor Bitters End announced a 2024 release in December 2023. In its first three days the film took 379.3 million yen, about $2.5 million, the highest total for a foreign film in the country. It placed third in the opening weekend box office. Warner Bros. had issued an apology after criticism that the Barbenheimer phenomenon was insensitive.

  Some Japanese theaters displayed warnings, and a number of viewers from Hiroshima reported discomfort and distress. The film does not depict the bombing of Japan. Some praised that choice, while others felt it downplayed or glorified the bombing. Takashi Hiraoka, a former mayor of Hiroshima, reportedly felt the horror of nuclear weapons was not shown enough. Masao Tomonaga, who survived one of the bombings, called the film "anti-nuclear". He was disappointed that there was no scene of the bombing, but satisfied by the portrayal of Oppenheimer's distress. Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Nolan treats Hiroshima and Nagasaki "as a profound absence, an indictment by silence". That article won him the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Spike Lee praised the film but felt that, given its length, it should have shown what happened to the Japanese people. James Cameron called it "a bit of a moral cop out". The Japanese director Takashi Yamazaki said he would like to dedicate a different film to that subject.

  Thirty Native American families were forcibly displaced from Los Alamos in 1942 to make room for the project, and critics faulted the film for leaving them out. Efforts at other sites such as Hanford, Washington and Oak Ridge, Tennessee also went unshown. The renewed attention to the Trinity site encouraged Congress to revisit the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990. That law compensates people affected by Cold War nuclear testing, known as Downwinders, who are primarily members of the Navajo Nation. The Senate approved amendments adding services for people in New Mexico, but the House had not yet debated them as part of the 2024 fiscal year defense bill. Efforts to expand it were continuing as of March 2025, and New Mexico lawmakers passed a non-binding resolution, House Memorial 15, in support.

  Some scenes were taken word for word from the book or from real events. Truman did call Oppenheimer a "crybaby", but in a letter to Dean Acheson a year later, not right after meeting him. Some shots show the current 50-star American flag, which was not adopted until 1960; during the war the flag had 48 stars. Oppenheimer and Einstein were friends, but the conversations at the heart of the film never happened. Oppenheimer took his worries about an unstoppable chain reaction to Karl Compton at MIT. Arthur Compton at the Metallurgical Laboratory had also recruited Oppenheimer to lead bomb-design research before Groves did. The poisoned apple scene rests on Oppenheimer's own accounts, and it is unclear whether it happened. Strauss is right in the film that Oppenheimer never expressed regret. As Chang explained, the film omits that Oppenheimer avoided apologizing to a reporter during his 1960 visit to Tokyo and Osaka. Scott Sagan called the production highly accurate for a Hollywood film.

  The film shows Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson striking Kyoto from the target list, supposedly because he had honeymooned there. Groves wrote in his 1962 autobiography that Stimson vetoed it to him personally, after visiting Kyoto as Governor-General of the Philippines. Historian Alex Wellerstein confirmed the honeymoon portrayal is a myth. Stimson's diary from his 1926 travels does not mention Kyoto, and the couple made only a single-night visit in 1929. In Nolan's published screenplay, Stimson cites only Kyoto's cultural significance. The honeymoon line was improvised on set by the actor James Remar, based on his own research for the part.

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