Poster for Chris Nolan's 'Oppenheimer'
UniversalI have no idea (and wouldn’t tell you if I did) as to whether audiences showing up to Nope this evening will get an announcement teaser for Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Three years ago, those seeing Hobbs & Shaw in IMAX got a barebones (and cryptic) teaser for Nolan’s Tenet, a tease that remained theatrically exclusive. Nolan has been doing such things at least since he debuted the bank robbery prologue of The Dark Knight with IMAX prints of I Am Legend in December of 2007. Again, I don’t know, and I wouldn’t spoil it if I did. However, we are exactly a year out from the July 21, 2023 release of Oppenheimer. The debut of this announcement/teaser poster again shows that Nolan is still committed to long-lead marketing.
We saw shorter marketing campaigns even before Covid. Studios finally realized that general audiences only started paying attention in the last two months. Moreover, it’s not like the “real” marketing campaigns for The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Dunkirk and Tenet did not begin until around six or seven months before the intended theatrical release date. We got that announcement teaser for The Dark Knight in July of 2007 with the opening night of The Simpsons and then mostly radio silence (online/viral mystery marketing notwithstanding) until the trailer and IMAX prologue in December of 2007, just seven months from the film’s July 18, 2008 release. Ditto Dark Knight Rises (teaser with Harry Potter 8 in July, trailer with Sherlock Holmes 2 and Mission: Impossible 4 in December).
Anyway, I’ll save a history of long-lead marketing for if we get a teaser trailer tonight. The poster gets the job done in terms of announcing the film’s existence. It’s cryptic, with imagery that suggests either an atomic bomb explosion or Cillian Murphy needing to use the restroom (see also: Scarlett Johansson’s explosive farts on the Iron Man 2 posters and during The Avengers). Considering the online chatter about the plethora of white dudes in the cast, which probably makes historical sense, I am intrigued that the above-the-line cast includes three men (Murphy, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr.) and two women (Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh). I’ve been doing this long enough to remember when two women getting above-the-line credits (and, eventually, character posters) was rare enough to be noteworthy.
As for the film, one skewed challenge will be dealing with a media environment that will most likely be rooting for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie opening on the same day. We saw this with Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow implicitly being pitted against Shailene Woodley’s The Fault in Our Stars in June of 2014. There will likely be a narrative wanting to see Nolan’s presumably earnest historical drama “beaten” by Gerwig’s presumably bubble-gum camp comedy. Of course, Edge and Fault were both among that year’s best mainstream pictures, and the sci-fi actioner’s biggest nemesis was its $175 million budget (for which $375 million global wasn’t enough). Oppenheimer cost around $100 million, with its big stars taking home “just” $4-$5 million plus theatrical backends. Even Tenet-level grosses ($366 million worldwide) would be good enough for Oppenheimer.
I have mixed feelings about what did or didn’t happen two years ago in terms of Tenet’s theatrical release. Maybe Nolan demanded the film open mid-summer to “save movie theaters” and then jumped ship anyway. Maybe WB released it in August of 2020 because Jason Kilar and friends knew he’d never go for the HBO Max/Project Popcorn plan. I’m guessing it’s very much somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. Still, Tenet did well overseas ($305 million) and only floundered in North America when theaters in New York and Los Angeles didn’t reopen as expected. Its $366 million gross was aspirational through 2020 and 2021. Without picking sides, it would be ironic if Universal were hailed as Nolan’s new best pal when Oppenheimer earns grosses about on par with Tenet in more aggregable circumstances.
