‘Oppenheimer’ Bombshell: Christopher Nolan’s Latest Movie Earns His First ‘R’ Rating In 20+ Years
What’s 11 miles long and weighs 600 pounds? Christopher Nolan’s new R-rated movie, Oppenheimer.
Those are the dimensions of the IMAX print of Nolan’s movie about the father of the atomic bomb, coming to theaters July 21st. Friday, Variety revealed that Oppenheimer, which stars Cillian Murphy as the nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, will be given an “R” rating here in the US by the MPAA.
This makes Oppenheimer Nolan’s first R-rated film since 2002’s Insomnia. Nolan broke out in 2000 with the amnesiac thriller Memento, which also earned an “R” rating. However, his subsequent films, which include 2008’s The Dark Knight and 2011’s Inception, have all been rated PG-13.
Oppenheimer is also the longest movie of his career thus far, with a running time just shy of the three-hour mark, and Nolan shot the movie using a large format film camera, thus the hefty length and breadth of the film print. If you want to see the movie in all its oversized glory, Universal Pictures has now made tickets available for the film in premium theaters such as Imax 70mm, 70mm, Imax digital, 35mm, Dolby Cinema and more.
And it’s not just the film format that’s big – Nolan’s ambitious special effects will be on full display too. Nolan has already revealed he was able to simulate the explosion of the atomic bomb without relying on VFX, whatever that means.
“We knew that this had to be the showstopper,” Nolan said earlier in an interview. “We’re able to do things with picture now that before we were really only able to do with sound in terms of an oversize impact for the audience — an almost physical sense of response to the film.”
Oppenheimer follows theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as he leads the Manhattan Project and creates the atom bomb to end World War II. Oppenheimer also stars Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Emily Blunt, Gary Oldman, Dane DeHaan, Kenneth Branagh, Matthew Modine, Casey Affleck, Alden Ehrenreich, and Jason Clarke.
The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. The film is produced by Emma Thomas, Atlas Entertainment’s Charles Roven and Nolan.