Discussion YMMV / Oppenheimer

I don't think the sex scene in the hearing is a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. It's not out of nowhere, it's illustrating how naked Oppenheimer feels in the hearing about having his infidelity paraded in front of his wife and the world.

"Freedom is not a license for chaos" -Norton Juster's The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics Hide / Show Replies

Edited by AudioSpeaks2 Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

So the particular entry put down:

• And You Thought It Would Fail: A three-hour, R-rated biopic that's mostly about men in rooms having tense conversations? Carrying a budget of $100 million, small for Nolan but positively massive for a drama? Released in the middle of summer, a week after Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and the same week as Barbie? Even with Christopher Nolan and major stars like Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, and Emily Blunt, it seemed like the best the movie could hope for was a moderate profit. Instead, it exploded on opening weekend, and is currently set to become Christopher Nolan's biggest non-Batman opening weekend at the box office ever (beating out action movies like Inception and Interstellar) and the fifth biggest R-rated movie opening of all time.

How legit is this? Was it actually ever a widespread consensus that Oppenheimer was going to "fail"? Sure, it's very expensive and a tougher sell than Barbie and Mission Impossible, but considering the immense pre-release publicity (including memes), critical anticipation, and pedigree of involved creators, I think people were expecting it to merely do "okay" at worst, I never saw thinkpieces predicting how it was going to be crushed and not make back its budget or what have you. Obviously none of us are psychic so how its opening would turn out to be was all guesswork, but I would never describe the vibe surrounding the film to be that cynical.

Thanks for playing King's Quest V! Hide / Show Replies