Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer Passes Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk At The Global Box Office
There aren't a lot of directors around these days who can draw crowds into theaters simply through their personal brand and reputation (even the great Steven Spielberg is struggling), but Christopher Nolan is one of the rare few. With "Oppenheimer," his taut, tension-filled biographical thriller about the "father of the atomic bomb," Nolan was competing with himself in the sub-genre of movies set during World War II. His 2017 war film "Dunkirk," which depicted the evacuation of Allied soldiers from a beach surrounded by German forces, became the second-highest grossing war film of all time with its $527 million total (just behind "American Sniper," which grossed $547.4 million).
Now, Nolan has surpassed Nolan with a story set a couple of years after "Dunkirk" and on the other side of the Atlantic. "Oppenheimer" passed the half-billion mark after just three weekends at the box office, grossed $552.9 million by the end of Sunday. According to Variety, $114.2 million of that total comes from IMAX showings. Nolan shot the film on 65mm film using IMAX cameras, and his longstanding role as a champion of the format helped win "Oppenheimer" a three-week exclusive run on IMAX screens, which has been extended due to popular demand.
You may notice that "Oppenheimer" has passed the total not only for "Dunkirk" but also for "American Sniper," making it arguably the highest-grossing war movie of all time. "Arguably," because by design we don't really see the war in "Oppenheimer" — not even the moment when his creations are dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Elsewhere it's been described as the highest-grossing World War II movie of all time, but that's also a bit iffy. "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe," which is set during World War II and shows about as much of the war as "Oppenheimer" does, grossed $745 million back in 2005.
Nolan vs. Nolan
Aside from "Tenet," which he bullishly pushed to release in the middle of the pandemic in an effort to single-handedly save cinema, Nolan doesn't really have any flops to his name. Even "The Prestige," one of his less commercially successful projects, did fine, especially for a movie about two magicians having a squabble.
To date, Nolan's highest-grossing original film is 2010's "Inception," which had a smaller opening weekend ($62.7 million) than "Oppenheimer" ($82.4 million), but then became the movie to see, dropping just 32 percent in its second weekend and continuing to play in theaters for almost six months. Between its original release and various rereleases since, "Inception" has a running total of $870.7 million at the box office. If "Oppenheimer" continues to be the belle of the ball in IMAX theaters over the weeks to come, it could match that success or even surpass it.
Nolan has had two billion-dollar hits to date: "The Dark Knight" and "The Dark Knight Rises," the latter of which is still his highest-grossing film at $1.081 billion. Hitting 10 figures would be a tall order for "Oppenheimer," but there's a non-zero chance that Nolan could pull it off.