Why Christopher Nolan’s complex, science-y films don't bomb at the box office

British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan brings extraordinary craft to his films—superb visual imagination, exceptional editing and sound design, all backed by high production values. (Photo credit: Hella/ Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

Now that we have all watched Oppenheimer, perhaps more than once, it is time to ask some questions that could be playing on the minds of a lot of people. How on earth do Christopher Nolan’s films make so much money? As per latest reports, Oppenheimer has earned more than $853 million in global box office revenues despite releasing on the same day (July 21, 2023) as Barbie, the worldwide collections for which are around $1.34 billion now.

How does a film about a scientist whose name most people in the world are unfamiliar with, a film that is all dialogue and no action, has three parallel timelines—two in colour and one in black and white, and even these timelines constantly shift chronologically back and forth within themselves, become such a monstrous hit? And that too while competing with the most popular doll in history that billions of women across the planet have played with when they were children?

Oppenheimer is also R-rated—what we in India term “adults only”, which obviously limits the audience. It is now the second most successful R-rated movie ever. The only R-rated film that is ahead of it currently is Joker, about the Batman villain who would surely be well-known to millions of more people than the American scientist.

For those with an interest in the history of science, Oppenheimer is certainly an extremely interesting film, with its cast of some of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, from Einstein and Niels Bohr to Ernest Lawrence and Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman. But even here, if you blink too hard, you may miss a few of them. Feynman is referred to by name only once; the only other way you can recognize him is from the fact he plays the bongo at parties. Feynman was a passionate bongo player.

Much of the rest of the audience, from China—where the film has grossed more than $11 million in its first week—to Italy—nearly $10 million in five days, would possibly not have known what the Manhattan Project was about, or forgotten their school science lessons about “isotope” or “heavy water”. One can assume that the film would be quite difficult for them to figure out, at least in a single viewing.

But Nolan has been pulling these feats off consistently. He is perhaps the only Hollywood film director working currently who takes on highly complex themes, makes films that have huge budgets by any standard, and unfailingly delivers super-normal profits for the studios. His films routinely have production budgets of more than $100 million. Multiply that by at least two to take care of marketing costs and studio overheads, so his films can break even only if they are gigantic hits all over the world.

His movies are so demanding that there is a small industry on the internet devoted to analyzing them, and in many cases, the debaters can never agree on what Nolan actually meant. What exactly did the last shot of Inception with the spinning top imply? Was Leonardo DiCaprio still inside a dream within a dream which could be nested inside another dream? Was he alive at all or trapped forever in the dream world?

The physics of Interstellar, with its black holes and space-time curvatures was so challenging that the film was followed soon after by a 300-page book explaining the science, written by Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, who was a consultant for the movie. Tenet with its time inversions is maddeningly tough to follow and if one is obsessed with that sort of thing, a viewer can literally spend at least 50 hours trying to figure out whether Nolan has slipped up on his logic at any point.

As several critics have noted, Nolan’s films are essentially carefully and intricately constructed puzzles. He sets it all up, draws the viewer deep inside it and then just when the solution seems to be in sight, leaves a thread or two hanging, condemning the viewer to scratching their head about what actually happened in the last two and a half hours. But what Nolan also brings to his films is extraordinary craft—superb visual imagination, exceptional editing and sound design, all backed by high production values.

He took the Batman saga, which had been filmed several times before, and turned it into an examination of troubling moral questions in his Dark Knight trilogy, thus elevating a comic book to the realms of high philosophy. The audience was enchanted. Even if they were not too interested in all the ethical dilemmas being posed, they stayed for the thrills. And this is where Nolan differs from other directors—his films are uncompromising in their big ideas but they are mounted on a scale that awes the viewer. He may return home confused, but he would also be grateful for the cinema experience that he has just gone through.

This is what makes Nolan unique. Fanatically committed to making movies that can only be fully experienced in a darkened theatre, he immerses the viewer in the worlds he creates and then leaves them with doubts. But even for the undoubting, he makes sure it is always worth the ride.