2023 has been a rollercoaster of a year for an industry hit by setbacks – but Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan seems pretty chipper about the future of cinema.
Christopher Nolan seems more optimistic about the state of modern cinema than most.
And why shouldn’t he be? As he recently told Empire, “I’ve just made a three-hour film about Robert Oppenheimer which is R-rated and half in black-and-white – and it made a billion dollars. Of course I think films are doing great.”
“The crazy thing is that it’s literally the most successful film I’ve ever made.”
[Editor’s note: we’ve done some horribly rushed napkin-maths and he’s right – though Oppenheimer's $954m global box office is some $50m or so behind The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, it also cost at least $80m less to make than either bat-flick.]
“I’ve been doing this for 20 years and in the United Kingdom it’s my highest-grossing film. So I feel great about the state of the movie business, based on my own experience. But also based on seeing other movies break out, seeing audiences come back.”
That “other movies” comment most obviously applies to sworn enemy of the nuclear physicist, Greta Gerwig’s $1.44bn-grossing Barbie, but the rest of 2023 has had its fair share of box office surprises too. Several, despite some rather grim predictions for the future of the industry, are even pretty positive.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie might not be everyone’s idea of a breakout cinematic underdog, but the cutesy video game adaptation did make $1.36bn without the cushion of an existing film franchise. At the same time, Blumhouse’s much-anticipated Five Nights At Freddy’s proved to be the rare low-budget phenomenon to bring young people back to the big screen in their droves, and Nolan and Gerwig’s fellow big-name directors – Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott – found their own form of success with solid theatrical runs for their Apple-produced historical epics.
At the same time, analysts are predicting global box office revenues are likely to drop by as much as five percent in 2024 as Hollywood struggles to recover from months of strike action. In the long term, though, let’s hope Mr Nolan is right. I don’t know if you can tell, but we rather like the movie business, here.
