Oppenheimer Sets Another Record, Dethrones Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street
Christopher Nolan collects a pretty rare achievement with his latest movie as Oppenheimer moves The Wolf of Wall Street aside to take its sweet spot at the top.
It doesn’t seem like this year’s two most-anticipated movie releases plan on ending their record-breaking spree any time soon. We’ve already almost lost track of how many feats Barbie and Oppenheimer have pulled off by now, but Christopher Nolan strikes again and grabs a rather unique achievement for his latest movie.
After its second weekend, Oppenheimer dethroned The Wolf of Wall Street as the second-highest-grossing R-rated biopic at the worldwide box office ever. This weekend allowed Nolan’s magnum opus to surpass Martin Scorsese ’s acclaimed movie and take the silver medal for itself…but its ambition doesn’t stop there.
Currently, the top-3 movies in this category are American Sniper with $547.3M, Oppenheimer with $400.4M, and The Wolf of Wall Street with $392M which only just moved to the third place. While the gap between American Sniper and Oppenheimer is more than significant, there’s still more than enough time to close in on that one.
As of now, Oppenheimer’s only been released for two full weeks, and it’s sitting at $400M in total revenue. This essentially means that to claim the top of the mountain, Christopher Nolan’s latest movie needs another $147M, and that’s a formidable amount. It becomes less scary as you realize Oppenheimer still has weeks ahead.
We don’t want to bring on any major projections or claim that Oppenheimer will necessarily dethrone American Sniper, too: after all, every movie’s box office results only keep dropping after the second weekend, and there’s quite a gap between the two films.
We are, however, saying that with IMAX’s recent decision to extend Oppenheimer’s exclusive run for an extra week and the never ending flow of people trying to book their tickets to the movie (while in New York, it’s fully booked until August 16), there are more than enough chances for it to happen — even if seems against all odds.
Even if Oppenheimer stops at the second spot, it’s one hell of an achievement already considering that this 3-hour-long biopic about a physicist managed to outgross a bold and controversial film about a rich and shameless a-hole.