Christopher Nolan Fans Aren’t the Only Ones Showing Up for ‘Oppenheimer’

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While “Barbie” earned the biggest opening of the summer this past weekend, Universal’s “Oppenheimer” pulled off an equally impressive feat, defying all expectations to gross an $82 million opening.

The perhaps unanswerable question here is how much of this success did the movie achieve on its own, drawing on director Chris Nolan’s reputation as a cinematic auteur, and how much it benefited from the “Barbenheimer” hype around two very different movies opening on the same day. Demographic data suggests its outsized box office haul came in part from younger audiences — those who also powered “Barbie” to the top of the box office — showing up in greater numbers than Universal expected.

Heading into the weekend, independent trackers projected an opening for the three-hour biopic that would match or slightly exceed the $50.5 million start for Nolan’s 2017 film “Dunkirk.”

Instead, it has become the third-highest opening of Nolan’s career and passed “John Wick: Chapter 4” for the highest opening seen by an R-rated film since the pandemic shutdown. The film’s torrential pace continued on Monday with another $12.6 million added as numerous theaters with Imax screens, including the 70mm TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood, added early morning showtimes to keep up with demand.

The filmmaker behind “The Dark Knight” and “Inception” was already known as one of the few remaining box office draws in the director’s chair, but Nolan’s reputation is now bigger than ever.

“Moviegoers have a very deep trust in Christopher Nolan that he’s built up for decades,” said Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “He is known as a filmmaker who makes movies that are smart and challenging but are still accessible to a wide audience, and they have shown they are willing to buy a ticket no matter what his film is about.”

For insiders at Universal, the most surprising aspect of this past weekend was the age demographic breakdown for “Oppenheimer.” While the film predictably skewed male at 62%, there were expectations that the movie would get the majority of its audience from Millennial and Gen X audiences ages 25-54.

Instead, “Oppenheimer” played broadly across all adult age demos, with 60% of the film’s audience coming from the 18-34 age range. By comparison, 48% of the opening weekend audience of “Dunkirk” came from that range. Drilling down into Gen Z turnout, 37% of the film’s audience was under the age of 25.

Unless those younger audiences put on a mask to see “Tenet” in theaters when it came out during the pandemic in 2020, the oldest of that cohort would have been 18 when “Dunkirk” came out. Perhaps Nolan’s reputation as a bold and unique filmmaker is quickly spreading to a new generation.

Or perhaps Nolan got a boost from a certain double feature craze that has swept the world. There’s no denying at this point that the “Barbenheimer” pop culture phenomenon had a significant impact in raising awareness and interest in “Oppenheimer” from moviegoers who were excited to see “Barbie” this weekend; a good chunk of whom might not have been intrigued enough by “Oppenheimer” to buy a ticket had it not shared a release date with Greta Gerwig’s sharp-witted comedy.

According to a survey of “Oppenheimer” moviegoers conducted by film data research firm The Quorum and first published by Indiewire, 6% of those surveyed said they bought a ticket for Nolan’s film because screenings of “Barbie” at their local theater were sold out.

Then there were those inspired by the “Barbenheimer” memes to see both films this weekend, a group that was estimated by the National Association of Theater Owners this past Wednesday to total at least 200,000 moviegoers.

But the dollars-and-cents impact of this black-and-pink cultural rarity can’t be easily quantified. A group that is more difficult to count than Nolan’s built-in fanbase and the contingent of “Barbie” lovers are those who might not have been immediately hooked on either film but were intrigued by “Oppenheimer” after discovering the film, either through Universal’s own marketing or the meme craze that grew organically.

While Nolan has always been known during his time at Warner Bros. for selling his movies as pieces of intricate cinematic craftsmanship best enjoyed on the largest screen possible with surround-sound speakers that show off his team’s thunderous auditory design, “Oppenheimer” took this approach to the next level.

For months, Nolan spoke in press interviews and publicity featurettes about how his team worked with Imax to create the first ever black-and-white 65mm film for Imax cameras and used practical effects to recreate the infamous Trinity nuclear bomb test that serves as the film’s centerpiece.

Like James Cameron with 3D technology, Nolan has built a reputation with audiences that creates the need to not only see his films, but to see them in premium formats. As a result, 47% of the film’s $82 million gross, including 26% Imax, came from premium formats whose surcharges further boosted the film’s take.

Just like “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer” took advantage of a perfect storm of a filmmaker’s unique, quality vision, marketed with a top-notch Hollywood studio campaign targeted to its core audience and boosted by an organic fan movement that sold that marketing pitch to an audience subset that otherwise might have passed on a three-hour drama with nuclear explosions, government hearings, long speeches on Communism and quantum physics and harrowing visions of atomic fallout.

But “Oppenheimer” successfully sold itself to the world, and what’s more, viewers love it. At a time when films are often sorted into pop-culture crowd-pleasers or niche “prestige” fare, Nolan has made a film that fits into both. It earned an A from audiences on CinemaScore and rave reviews from both critics and users on Rotten Tomatoes.

It’s very likely that this will be a rare event that may not repeat itself during the awards season this fall, even with other famous filmmakers set to release titles like Martin Scorsese’s already-acclaimed “Killers of the Flower Moon” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott’s grisly historical epic “Napoleon” starring Joaquin Phoenix. The recipe for success that “Oppenheimer” pulled off cannot be so easily replicated.

But for now, there is still hope that with the right filmmaker and the right pitch, along with a little bit of luck, movies that confront the more chilling sides of our society can still thrive at the cinema. It’s been a long time since a film like “Oppenheimer” has drawn an audience this big, but we will find out more in the coming weeks just how big of a pop culture footprint it can leave behind.

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