I’m not even from an English speaking country, but I can’t spend more than 10 minutes surfing the internet without at least one Oppenheimer reference or meme, before that it was Chernobyl, shows like Peaky Blinders and I don’t understand where all that popularity comes from.
I haven’t watched them, but I suppose they are good movies/shows and of high quality production, but so are many other movies and very little of them get this insane levels of global popularity. I doubt 5% of people in my country even knew who Oppenheimer was a few weeks ago, people might have heard the term Manhattan project, but an average person on the street would probably have no idea who some dude called Robert Oppenheimer was. Yet, now overnight everyone is an expert on his life, nuclear bombs and so on.
Barbie is a household name across the planet, so it’s popularity makes far more sense, then there are legendary globaly known series such as Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible which as far as I know also released new movies recently, but I barely saw anything about them in the American part of the internet, let alone outside it.
So in essence, are niche-topic productions like Oppenheimer and Chernobyl really that insanely great that they merit such a level of global popularity…or is it more that it is simply new refreshing topics, instead of old series people might have gotten bored with?
I’m guessing, like you said, that it’s the compelling nature of real-life history combined with everyone’s utter fatigue with nonstop superhero films, recycled stuff, sequels galore, and total lack of creativity in Hollywood these days.
Even though the Manhattan Project isn’t the most down to earth topic to make a movie about, it’s still a breath of fresh air.
Haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet, but Chernobyl (assuming you mean the HBO series) was an amazing production; heartbreaking and tragic and riveting. It also explained how and why it happened in a way that felt in-depth but clear enough that a layman like me was able to feel like I got it. I understand that it kept close to the actual facts. I think Chernobyl highly deserved all of the ‘buzz’ and acclaim it received. I have similar high hopes for Oppenheimer.
Yes, 1000%. I am sick of movies about superheroes and CGI dinosaurs.
What’s “niche” about these movies? So far as I can tell, historical fiction is firmly mainstream. It’s the things like superhero movies that are niche.
I disagree with your premise that topics like the dawn of the Atomic Age are niche, or that people do not know or care about people like Robert Oppenheimer or Alexander Fleming and their work. However, any given movie could, all else being equal, be really great or be average or even be shit, even given a compelling subject.
I think it depends on you. As a history nerd I loved Lincoln and Oppenheimer and feel they are several cuts above. My wife who is not into history was like, “Meh. The acting was great.” In juxtaposition, she feels Magnolia was a phenomenal movie and should have won Tom Cruise an Oscar. My feeling is that it is OK but that Grand Canyon did a much better job.
I would argue that most people who watch movies or TV shows about historical events want to learn something new and not see something they’re already relatively familiar with.
I suspect the name “Nolan” has more to do with the hype around the film than the name “Oppenheimer”. The story has been done before; just not by a filmmaker with this much prestige and budget.
How many IMAX film projectors are there even still around? The giant-dome theater around here switched to digital years back (and in the process, dropped the IMAX name).
Niche is not a word in Hollywood production dictionaries. Once you get above a film production budget of, let’s guess, $10 million, you need to appeal to a mass audience to break even. To do that the relentless bean-counting requires that it be seen by at least X people on Y screens. To do that reliably it needs star power, hype and a way of appealing to the biggest possible movie-seeing demographic.
The art lies in ‘biggest possible movie-seeing demographic’. You can do that by relying on the draw-power of big name stars or shameless hype or piggybacking off a successful franchise based on a comic book. Or you can construct a campaign that this is a ‘fun’ movie you must see as a family, or this is important because its historically significant and you are a better person for having spent three hours understanding a person faced with an unusual situation in a well-crafted entertaining story.
All of these are legit strategies employed by big filmmakers to make reliably top selling movies. Telling the story centred on a niche topic or character is one way to draw distinction from the pack. But it only works because its still doing what Hollywood does best.
I’m personally disappointed that Oppenheimer didn’t fall into a vat of radioactive wasps and actually become death, the destroyer of worlds. There is a franchise gap there.
In The Beginning or the End (1947), in which Hume Cronyn is miscast as Oppenheimer, the filmmakers actually try to derive tension with some last-minute glitches aboard the Enola Gay. It was like: Oh no! What if they can’t drop the bomb?!
I’m disappointed that the film was supposed to be about the Manhattan Project, yet there wasn’t a single appearance of Dr. Manhattan (or his giant wang). Some sequel to Watchmen this turned out to be!
The article you’re citing got it wrong. The correct answer to @Chronos’ question is that there are about 90 theaters capable of showing 15-perf/70mm film worldwide. However, for many reasons, technical, practical, and financial, IMAX Corp and the studio decided to make only 30 prints that are playing in the most popular and best-performing 15/70-equipped theaters.
Beyond the tremendous expense of a three-hour 15/70 film print, one of the biggest problems is finding qualified projectionists. Most of the 30 IMAX theaters showing Oppenheimer are in multiplexes, and the last time they used their 15/70 film projectors was for Nolan’s last film, Dunkirk, in 2017. Chances are good that any projectionists with the specialized skill to operate that system have moved on, retired, or died.
So to “revive” the projectors, they had to bring people out of retirement or borrow them from other theaters that are still running film every day (e.g., museums and science centers). And every location needs at least two or three operators for the month of the run.
