"Barbenheimer" (or, alternatively "Barbieheimer") — The film releasing on the same day as Greta Gerwig's Barbie with its own All-Star Cast has led to many memes fusing the two films, fueled by the sheer force of Bathos from contrasting the very serious nature of Oppenheimer's invention of the nuclear bomb and ensuing moral dilemma against the whimsical and comedic nature of Barbie (and Oppenheimer's dark and sometimes Deliberately Monochrome look vs the bright and predominantly pink look of Barbie). See also that film's meme page.
Not only does the film share a release date with Barbie, but also with the release of Shin Kamen Rider (2023) on Amazon Prime Video outside Japan and the release of Pikmin 4, evolving the meme into what's known as "Shin-barminheimer."
During weeks leading up to both films' release, people pokedfun on how Barbie went all-in for their marketing and promotions ranging from collaborations, worldwide installations, and merchandise while Oppenheimer only released photos of Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, with people calling said photos as the only pieces of marketing that Oppenheimer gave out given the film's subject matter, the Reclusive Artist reputation of Cillian Murphy, and his massiveEstrogen Brigade.
Barbie/Oppenheimer has also become a fairly popular Crossover Ship, though almost always taken as a joke, with works about it ranging from simple Crack Fic to a full-blown existential romance between a normal human and a seemingly otherworldly humanoid being.
In December 2023, Variety Magazine launched its annual Actors on Actors interview series, where paired-up actors from (usually) different projects have a mutual discussion about their admiration of each other and discuss their craft. Cillian Murphy, upon being invited to participate, immediately had his agent reach out to see if he could be paired with Margot Robbie. Not only did Variety and Robbie accept, but the accompanying video and photoshoot had Murphy in somber black and Robbie in eye-popping Barbie pink, by their own personal choices.
Considering Christopher Nolan's love for Practical Effects over CGI most of the time, jokes that he would use real atomic bomb explosions for this film are not uncommon but took off when Nolan announced he somehow recreated the first nuclear weapon detonation without using CGI for the film.
The film has led to a glut of memes poking fun at Oppenheimer for being willing to invent a weapon of mass destruction seemingly without considering what it might be used for. Some of these jokes invoke Deliberate Values Dissonance by giving the project names like "Project Japslayer Megabomb" or "Japmelter 3000 Megaladon Ultrakill", and having Oppenheimer express horror at it being used to kill Japanese people.
"My le bomb..... le killed people!?!?" / OPPENHEIMER STYLEExplanationA quote from a 4chan greentext which approximated what a movie trailer for a schlockey comedy version of Oppenheimer would look like, among other things referencing "Gangnam Style" (because of the "oppen" part of Oppenheimer's name sounding like part of the chorus of "Gangnam Style") and Rage Comics to jab at attempts by out-of-touch executives at being "hip." The inherent absurdity of the quote, as well as overlap with the above meme about Oppenheimer seemingly not knowing that bombs kill people, resulted in it becoming a popular subject for parody, rewriting it to fit a number of situations while preserving the Rage Comic-style writing (particularly the heavy use of "le").
The truly massive All-Star Cast of the film has also led to jokes such as a tweet stating that if the film wins the Oscar for Best Picture, everyone in the audience would go onstage. Others have joked that this and the Barbie film are saving the film industry by employing as many actors as possible.
The reveal of Albert Einstein's appearance as a character has led to some:
With Christopher Nolan's propensity for practical effects and Discussing Film's failure to mention Tom Conti as Einstein's actor in a tweet, fans liked to joke that Nolan literally brought Einstein back to life to play himself in the film.
People also began treating Einstein's appearance as something akin to a Marvel Cinematic Universe cameo, as either a Sequel Hook to a larger Shared Universe franchise of history's most renowned scientists or a live-action debut of an iconic but non-mainstream character that has science fans hyped.
Josh Peck getting a minor role has, of course, led to several Drake & Josh references—most notably, his imagined comment on the shape of the "Gadget", a.k.a. the Trinity Atomic Bomb.
"It's spherical!!"
When it was announced that Oppenheimer received an R rating in part due to sexual content and nudity, it led to many jokes about how Oppenheimer would actually somehow have sex with the atomic bomb and many bomb-related sex puns. It was later revealed that there would be a sex scene with Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh (who plays Oppenheimer's mistress Jean Tatlock) containing full nudity from both of them, leading to more jokes about how viewers would be able to see it in all its glory in IMAX 70mm or how Oppenheimer would have sex with Jean while inside the atomic bomb, as well as even more puns.
Toho Studios announced the release of Godzilla Minus One a week and a half before the release of Oppenheimer. The Big G's new film will be set in post-war Japan and deal heavily with nuclear weaponry. The "Oppenheimer is a Godzilla prequel" jokes wrote themselves.
A matched pair of edited posters for both movies (Oppenheimer's retitled Fuck Around and Godzilla's retitled Find Out) have been making the rounds.
Ditto with a joke about Oppenheimer having a post-credits scene of Godzilla rising from the ocean.
The main theatrical poster◊, which features a behatted Oppenheimer intensely standing before his destructive creation, has been the basis for at least three kinds of jokes:
The first is about how the poster looks more like a Darker and Edgier live action reboot of Inspector Gadget. It probably doesn't help that the Working Title for the movie was already Gadget (the name of the bomb detonated during the Trinity test).
The second is that it looks like a Right Behind Me scenario where Oppenheimer denounces the bomb as he expresses regret in creating it only to nervously say "I-it's right behind me isn't it?"
Oppenheimer if he invented something fun like [x] ExplanationA common caption attached to an edited picture of Oppenheimer grinning happily, noting how he wouldn't have had to wrestle with the guilt of having invented the atomic bomb if he just invented a toy or a game or something instead.
"Sex! I'm wanting more! Tell the world: stop the war!" ExplanationSoon after the film was released, American YouTuber and comedian Kyle Gordon released "Planet of the Bass," a parody of 1990's Eurodance songs with purposefully nonsensical lyrics. This particular line from the song is often jokingly attributed to the real Oppenheimer or to his portrayal in the film (similar to "It's morbin' time!"), as it neatly encapsulates both his sexual escapades and hand-wringing over the use of nuclear weapons.
The real Robert Oppenheimer was very thin (to the point of being underweight for basically his entire adult life), and while Cillian Murphy didn't drop all the way down to the physicist's dangerously low weight of roughly 120 pounds, he did restrict his eating very severely while filming to give himself a similarly gaunt look. This, along with his 1940s-style baggy trousers, makes Murphy's waist look startlingly narrow at many points in the film (particularly when he's climbing the Trinity test tower), which in turn spawned several jokes about the desirability of an "Oppenheimer waist" (or, less politely, referring to his waist as "slutty"). One female viewer even commented that Murphy's waist in the tower-climbing scene gave her more anxiety about her own figure than anything in Barbie, despite the highly publicized fears from Moral Guardians in the lead-up to Barbie's release that it would renew the body image problems some women experienced from the social influence of Barbie dolls.
During the movie's release, a new meme has been spawned: Oppenheimer ended up being the movie to set unrealistic beauty standards instead of Barbie, with audiences looking into using jade rollers or gua sha after seeing the movie in order to achieve Cillian Murphy's jawline, with people jokingly referring to the movie as "Buccal fat removal propaganda".
Lewis Strauss has become a Twitter meme in himself, usually as a way for the user to ironically acknowledge their own probably baseless paranoia that someone else is talking about them behind their back or to suggest a willingness to enact elaborate revenge over a slight.
Oppenheimer’s remarkable sexual history is another popular Twitter meme subject, with a few variations:
Jokes about his startling number of one night stands, often with married women, while he himself was also married, including the frequent suggestion that Los Alamos was really just a way to get other men to bring their wives along to a concentrated location so Oppenheimer could tryst with the wives in question.
Expressing surprise that anyone as frail and in generally poor health as Oppenheimer was had the stamina to have so many affairs.
Joking that Oppenheimer is very justified as a love interest in any Self-Insert Fic, because of his aforementioned promiscuous infidelity making it unusually easy to imagine him having an affair with the author’s self-insert.
The Oppenbronzer.ExplanationThe makeup department used bronzer to emphasize Cillian Murphy’s cheekbones even further and make his skin look more weathered to create more of a resemblance to the real Oppenheimer, and many regular makeup users on Twitter began joking about its prominence once word got out that that was the product used for that effect. Entertainment journalist Hunter Harris even published an “interview” with the bronzer (with no explanation given as to how a makeup product could give an interview).
Similarly to the above, using images of Oppenheimer being interrogated by Roger Robb at his security clearance renewal hearing has become a way of poking fun at feeling like one's embarrassing behavior or association with a group of people one doesn't want to be associated with is being dredged up (such as former Harry Potter fans insisting they always preferred Percy Jackson). Some versions of the meme use an ordinary image of Robb looking suspicious (often, but not always, accompanied by an image of Oppenheimer looking vaguely uncomfortable on the stand), but more intense ones use the washed-out, distorted images from when Oppenheimer is so overwhelmed by being faced with the reminder of his lack of interest in preventing the bomb being dropped on Japanese civilians that he starts to vividly hallucinate the effects of the bomb in the interrogation room itself.
Einstein's bitter prediction to Oppenheimer (based on his own rejection and re-embrace by the scientific community) that one day the same people who disgraced Oppenheimer will want to reward him for his work, but only to make themselves feel better, has grown popular as a shorthand for recognizing similar disposal/re-embrace patterns in other fields (such as this tweet suggesting George Lucas is the Einstein to Rian Johnson's Oppenheimer).
Related to the Barbenheimer Masculine–Feminine Gay Couple example above, there's a general meme about Oppenheimer (both as portrayed by Cillian Murphy and in Real Life) being a Butch Lesbian (sometimes while still being acknowledged as a cisgender man). For bonus points, some iterations focus on his resemblance to Alison Bechdel.
Lewis Strauss's encounter with a dour Albert Einstein has been compared to, of all things, a scene in Euphoria involving Cassie and Nate for it's similar setup.
" (or, alternatively "Barbieheimer") — The film releasing on the same day as Greta Gerwig's Barbie with its own All-Star Cast has led to many memes fusing the two films, fueled by the sheer force of Bathos from contrasting the very serious nature of Oppenheimer's invention of the nuclear bomb and ensuing moral dilemma against the whimsical and comedic nature of Barbie (and Oppenheimer's dark and sometimes Deliberately Monochrome look vs the bright and predominantly pink look of Barbie). See also that film's meme page.
