Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” an unsettling look at the dawn of the atomic era, dominated the 96th Academy Awards on Sunday, winning seven prizes, including best picture and best director. The film, which took on an added resonance at a time of international conflicts, also scored Oscars for Cillian Murphy’s haunted lead performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr.’s supporting turn as a vengeful bureaucrat.
The award-winning blockbuster is now available to stream Peacock, which last month also began streaming the following Nolan-directed films: “Batman Begins,” “The Dark Knight,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Dunkirk,” “Inception” and “Memento.”
“Oppenheimer” chronicles the story of the father of the atomic bomb, from his days as a physics student to his experience serving as director of the Manhattan Project to his 1954 security hearing. Matt Damon plays Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves Jr., Emily Blunt plays Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer and Downey Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The supporting cast comprises Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Michael Angarano, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Casey Affleck and more.
As one half of this summer’s “Barbenheimer” box office sensation, “Oppenheimer” grossed $950 million globally. Reflecting on the film’s box office success, Nolan told Variety, “It’s clear from the box office that audiences are looking for things they haven’t seen before. We’ve been through a period where it was wonderfully reassuring for studio executives to feel that their franchise properties could go on forever and be predictably successful. But you can’t deny filmgoers’ desire for novelty.”
Although the film became the highest-grossing biopic in history, Nolan would hesitate to categorize “Oppenheimer” that way: “It’s not a useful genre. I love working in useful genres. In this film… it’s the heist film as it applies to the Manhattan Project and the courtroom drama as it applies to the security hearings. It’s very useful to look at the conventions of those genres and how they can pull the audience and how they can give me communication with the audience.”