Christopher Nolan’s 1 Divisive Decision for Oppenheimer Failed to Impress Wife Emma Thomas Despite Movie’s Golden Globes Sweep
The remarkable engineer of exceptional cinema, Christopher Nolan, amazes the audience but falls short of his wife’s expectations. The director’s 2023 biographical epic Oppenheimer was highly praised by both critics and audiences. The movie centers on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is known as the Father of the Atomic Bomb.
The movie was a commercial hit, making it the third highest-grossing movie of Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking career. It surpassed Bohemian Rhapsody and became the most successful and impactful biopic ever made in history. Oppenheimer has also won 5 Golden Globe awards and 2 New York Film Critics Circle awards. The movie got a total of 254 official nominations and won 112 out of them.
However, producer Emma Thomas, director Christopher Nolan’s wife, initially had doubts regarding a few technicalities of the movie.
Emma Thomas Turned Skeptical Towards Christopher Nolan’s Masterpiece
Before the movie’s brilliant cinematic presentation and the incomparable performance of the veteran actors, Emma Thomas, the producer of the movie, was quite doubtful about it. The run time of the movie is three hours. While Nolan had no issues with this fact, his wife didn’t like it. She was worried that after COVID-19, audiences would find it difficult to gather patience for such a long movie in the theater.
During an interview with Variety, Thomas said:
“It’s not a film that’s easy to define; I knew he wanted to shoot a lot of it in black and white, and it was three hours — which I wasn’t really happy about. And I knew he wanted to release it in the summer, make it a big summer movie. So when I read the script my biggest worry was less logistics and more like how are we going to make this a big summer movie?”
Read More: Christopher Nolan Humbly Steps Back as Wife Emma Thomas Accepts ‘Oppenheimer’ Golden Globe Win
Further, Emma Thomas also mentioned that just like Inception, Oppenheimer is another risky movie by Nolan that may not yield the results expected by the team. Despite this, she supported Christopher Nolan and the movie has made records that are not going to be broken easily.
Christopher Nolan Convinced His Wife about His Choices
When both husband and wife took opposite grounds while fussing over the movie’s run time, Christopher Nolan relied on previous references to convince his wife, Emma Thomas. He took the example of Avengers, where the run time was long, yet the movie was heavily praised and acknowledged. To this, Thomas had no choice but to give in to Nolan’s demand.
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Thomas also didn’t probe any further because of her husband’s sensational track record in Hollywood. Although she hesitated a bit at first, with Nolan’s persuasive attempts, she eventually gave in. Of course, she didn’t have much hope that the movie could be a summer hit; the Tenet director proved her intuition wrong.
Emma Thomas invested roughly 100 million dollars into the movie and, in return, got her summer gift worth 950 million dollars. To this, Emma Thomas was quite impressed with the calculated risks of her husband and praised his audacity.
Oppenheimer is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+.
