Box Office Bombs: Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ is a Deeply Personal Requiem for the Superhero Era

All art has an element of the autobiographical. It is not special in this regard. Art has this in common with all fields of human endeavor, in which past experiences influence present actions. A teacher revises his lesson plan based on the previous class’s response, an Uber driver takes a different route because she ran into construction the day before — or a nuclear physicist designs the most dangerous weapon in the history of humankind because his brain is uniquely wired to understand the process, and because his Jewishness and left-wing politics drive home the terror that if he doesn’t do it, the Nazis will. In all cases choice is involved, and the work you make, including creative work, is not simple regurgitation; talent, skill, and imagination all come into play, and can be honed and sharpened to make better work over time. 

So I think it trivializes neither the hard work that artist Christopher Nolan poured into Oppenheimer — nor the grievous actions depicted in the film itself — to suggest that Oppenheimer, too, is reflective of the life of its creator. (He did cast his own daughter as the woman whose face peels off in the title character’s horrific vision of what he has wrought in an admittedly unconscious expression of his horror of the bomb, so I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb.) Here, after all, we have the story of a brilliant technician, preeminent in his field, successful in ways few of his colleagues can hope to emulate. He is tasked with the completion of a tremendous project that will change the world forever, which he completes with nearly (but not quite—ask Jean Tatlock) monomaniacal furor even when the need that initially drove him to do so subsides. Unleashed upon the world his project is an even bigger success — from the perspective of his bosses, if not that of humanity in general or the people of Japan in particular — than he imagined. And for one reason or another, he will regret that success for the rest of his life.

I’d like at this point to draw your attention to the response offered by the director of The Dark Knight, the most acclaimed and at one point the most financially successful superhero movie ever made, when asked if he’d ever make another superhero movie: “No.” (Shades of Rorschach?) I’ll similarly direct you to Nolan’s lament regarding plot-driven filmmaking: “Studios now look at a screenplay as a series of events and say ‘this is the essence of what the film is.’ And that’s completely at odds with how cinema developed….It’s a very popular fallacy — sometimes with the critics as well, frankly — that all that matters is the scale of the story being told.”

The cultural dominance of superheroes, which seems only in recent months to finally be on the wane, began with the success of the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises in the early 2000s. But it only truly reached maturity in 2008 with the one-two punch of Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Jon Favreau’s (or is that Kevin Feige’s) Iron Man. (Which featured, ironically, Oppenheimer co-star Robert Downey Jr., whose charisma as Tony Stark is arguably more responsible for the subsequent boom than any other factor save perhaps Hugh Jackman’s as Wolverine years earlier.) From there, it was off to the races. The Warner Bros./DC end of the spectrum advanced only in fits and starts, due to the on-again off-again quality of the aesthetic and narrative continuity between the films and an often contentious relationship with the filmmakers involved. This eventually included Nolan himself, who departed the studio to which he meant so much over a dispute regarding the simultaneous theatrical and digital release of his film Tenet. 

Disney and Marvel, however, built a juggernaut, a world-beater. Over a decade of interconnecting stories across film and television (a medium to which Nolan has also offered a firm “no”) led to and culminated in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, which is currently the highest grossing superhero movie of all time — a slot once occupied by The Dark Knight. Indeed, fully fourteen superhero films have surpassed TDK, including Nolan’s own less well-received (but better, thanks to Bane and Bane alone) The Dark Knight Rises, at the box office, since the Christian Bale/Heath Ledger vehicle became only the fourth film to break the billion-dollar mark. Avengers: Infinity War, part one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s temporary denouement, now takes second place in the category behind its successor. 

There is of course reason to believe this spandex grip on pop culture’s beating heart is loosening. Any superhero comics reader worth their salt could have told the Disney/Marvel c-suite that Endgame is what’s known in the business as a “jumping-off point” — an ending, of sorts anyway, amid the endless cycle of superhero stories that keep us reading or watching from one year and one decade to the next. If, as Nolan warns, you’ve prioritized plot above all else, you’ve just spent ten years telling the biggest movie audiences in the world that the plot all builds to this, and then you release a movie in which this happens? “Wow, that was fun! What else is on?” is a perfectly natural reaction. The surprisingly weak financial fortunes of Marvel’s “Phase 4” projects is proof of that, while DC releasing one bomb after another in the build-up to Marvel alum James Gunn’s rebooting of the Warner Bros. Discovery superhero factory shows that the rot is not contained to just one multiverse. 

Ironically, it may be the “Barbenheimer” event, made possible by Nolan and Greta Gerwig, that marks a cultural denouement for the genre. As writer Aaron Hammond put it on Elon Musk’s folly, “It’d be wild if Barbenheimer goes down in history as the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ that kills off the Superhero Era, which has been in its hair metal phase for a while now.” I’ve been mulling that over since the moment I read it.

Whatever the future holds, I’d imagine that if you’re Christopher Nolan surveying the landscape into which Oppeneheimer emerged, you find it all pretty baleful. Justified or not (I personally am not a fan, though that’s really neither here nor there), The Dark Knight convinced audiences that superhero movies could have something to say, and could say it with genuine visual and sonic flair on as large a canvas as possible — even without the CGI-slop lunar landscapes and poorly choreographed laser-beam fights that would become the genre’s stock in trade as Marvel’s story went increasingly cosmic. It also convinced executives that superheroes were the biggest cash cow in the pasture. I don’t mean to dismiss the joy and awe that movie brought to its fans, which not even I would dispute. But look around: Visually, culturally, in terms of the long-term health of the movie business, did the ascendency of the superhero movie to the box-office throne via The Dark Knight help or harm?

The rap on Nolan is that he makes a dumb guy’s idea of what smart movies are, and I won’t lie and say I hadn’t felt that way myself up until Oppenheimer. (It’s been a while since I caught a new Nolan, but having seen and varying-degrees-of-disliked five of his movies in a row, including four seen in theaters as he would have wished, I felt it was fair to call it a day, at least for a while.) I do think this movie will change that reputation somewhat; it certainly has for me.

But Nolan himself is not a dumb guy, and never has been. In the past few years, as the David Zaslavs of the world conquer and devour some of the greatest cultural institutions this country has ever produced, he’s proven to be a perspicacious and relentless critic of Hollywood’s prioritization of short-term cash over long-term health. He’s a true cinephile, in a business that is (or was, before last weekend) increasingly hostile to such individuals. Surely he sees the role his Bat-films played in all this, particularly The Dark Knight, the biggest and most technically formidable such film ever dropped on the populace up until that point. Surely he worries about his legacy as a result. He may even wonder if the world would be better off if he’d never made it at all.

So, again, I hope it trivializes neither the intelligence and labor that went into creating Oppenheimer — nor the world-historical crime its title character committed — to say that I see Nolan himself in this story. A story of a technical genius gifted with beautiful visions of the world (depicted so memorably in the snatches of Stan Brakhage microcosmic abstractions that flash through his brain early on in the film), who lets his zeal for employing his genius to create something new overwhelm his judgment until it’s too late to put the genie back in the bottle. It sounds familiar, is what I’m saying. 

“Truthfully, I try not to analyse my own intentions,” Nolan told The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin when asked about his decision to cast his daughter in that small but pivotal role mentioned above. “But the point is that if you create the ultimate destructive power it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you. So I suppose this was my way of expressing that in what, to me, were the strongest possible terms.” Cinema itself is near and dear to Christopher Nolan, the director more responsible than any other for creating the power that is the modern superhero blockbuster. If he felt he’d inadvertently or recklessly destroyed that which means so much to him, what are the strongest possible terms in which he could express his regret? I believe we’ve just watched the answer.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the films being covered here wouldn’t exist.)

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.