9 Months After Release, Oppenheimer Breaks Nolan's 12-Year-Old Record
Before Oppenheimer, The Dark Knight Rises held this record since 2012.
Summary:
- In 2012, The Dark Knight Rises became Christopher Nolan ’s highest-grossing overseas movie with $634M earned outside the domestic market.
- Recently, Oppenheimer reached the $638M thanks to its Japanese run, making the three-hour-long biopic Nolan’s new overseas king.
- In total, Oppenheimer is sitting at $968M worldwide, falling just a little bit short of joining the $1B movie club, but it’s still running in some regions.
Christopher Nolan is one of the most acclaimed movie directors of our time, and his latest movie — Oppenheimer, a three-hour-long partially black-and-white biopic of a physicist that became a worldwide hit — proved it once again. Oppenheimer turned out so great that even nine months after its premiere, it keeps breaking records.
This time, it was thanks to the Japanese theaters that the movie made the news.
Oppenheimer Dethrones The Dark Knight Rises
The Dark Knight trilogy is Christopher Nolan’s only movie series, and it’s always been popular. So much so, in fact, that the trilogy’s finale in 2012 set the director’s personal record: The Dark Knight Rises earned over $634M overseas alone, and for the next 12 years, no other movie of his has come even close to this number.
Until now.
The relatively recent Japanese release of Oppenheimer ensured that even 9 months after its first premiere, the movie kept making money. Thanks to that, just a few days ago, Nolan’s magnum opus broke a new record: it reached over $638M at the overseas box office, becoming the director’s new highest-grossing movie outside the domestic market. For context, the iconic Inception only made $542M overseas.
Oppenheimer Keeps Crawling to the $1B Club
While the absolute majority of the theaters in the world have long stopped running Oppenheimer, some markets — like Japan — only recently received the movie. There are some other Asian countries where Christopher Nolan’s latest masterpiece is still considered to be a new arrival, and their theaters keep earning it money.
Oppenheimer fell embarrassingly short of the coveted $1B during its primary run: despite being immensely popular, it still had just a few tens of millions to go. Currently, the movie is sitting at over $968M global box office revenue, meaning it only has around $32M to make until it joins the elite billion-dollar movie club.
The chances are really slick considering Oppenheimer’s no longer running in the biggest markets… But hey, most people didn’t believe in atomic bombs, either.