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Christoper Nolan’s latest epic “Oppenheimer” began its domestic box office marathon with a whopping $10.5 million in Thursday preview grosses. That’s a staggering total for what is essentially a 3-hour, R-rated grimdark drama mostly concerned with men in suits having cryptic conversations about science and politics.
It’s also around double the preview grosses for “Interstellar” ($4.8 million in 2014) and “Dunkirk” ($5.5 million in 2017), pointing toward an opening weekend figure well above those films’ respective $49 million and $50 million Fri-Sun debuts.
A straight Thursday-to-weekend math comparison between these last two conventionally released Christopher Nolan films (“Tenet” has the world’s largest asterisk for its summer-of-2020 week-long domestic debut amid crippling COVID conditions) argues for an opening weekend between $95 million and $108 million. That’s probably hyperbolic, as (quality notwithstanding) the film isn’t exactly a ripping crowdpleaser in the conventional sense. Still, that “Oppenheimer” earned around twice the Thursday preview grosses as those respective films means it can be twice as frontloaded with equal weekend results.
Nonetheless, a movie like “Oppenheimer” just scored bigger preview earnings than the $7 million-$9 million posted by a slew of more conventional tentpole films like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “John Wick: Chapter 4,” “Fast X” and “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.” Similar Thursday-to-weekend math (“Mission: Impossible 7” opened on a Wednesday, natch) positions the Cillian Murphy/Emily Blunt/Robert Downey Jr./Matt Damon/Florence Pugh drama for an opening between and $86 million and $95 million.
Even exceptional frontloading, say a 15% Thursday to weekend split, due to the Nolan fandom racing out as soon as possible and the open question of whether general audiences will immediately flock to such a film, would still point toward a sky-high $70 million opening weekend. The film will almost certainly score, by far, the biggest opening ever for a movie with a concurrent $100 million-plus domestic debut playing alongside it.
Moreover, this “both films win” result is a validation for the notion that COVID-era moviegoing can justify having two big movies opening either directly against each other or pretty darn close to each other. Once upon a time, it was normal to see “World War Z” opening with $66 million on the same weekend that “Monsters University” opened to $82 million.
As noted in Friday morning’s report on “Barbie” and its $22.3 million Thursday gross, it’s clear that opening it against “Oppenheimer” helped turn both films into buzzy, meme-worthy cultural events to the benefit of both films. And it’s quite possible that the online conversation about “Barbenheimmer” double-features will mean folks who otherwise might have just seen “Barbie” will also show up to “Oppenheimer” over the next couple of days.
