6. The Year of the Bomb

For over a decade, the box office has been dominated by superheroes—mostly in the form of cinematic universes that linked dozens of movies and streaming series in long, complex mythologies of characters, concepts, and conflicts. In the past few years, this has even meant multiverse concepts linking the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the Fox X-Men series and DC Cinematic Universe with previous Batmans played by George Clooney and Michael Keaton. Everything is now connected. The problem? Audiences finally, after years of predicted superhero fatigue, might just be over it all. 

The biggest bombs of 2023 were movies like The Flash, Aquaman 2, Shazam 2, and The Marvels. As perhaps part of the same phenomenon, a kind of tentpole fatigue, movies like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One all underperformed despite some of the highest budgets in cinematic history. Rather than the predictable hits, two wildcards emerged victorious in the year of the bomb. And they came out on the same day. 

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer both released on July 21, 2023, two movies that could not be more tonally opposite and yet became entwined in popular culture as a bundled phenomenon known as Barbenheimer. Both wildly overperformed expectations and are continuing to ride that wave all the way through awards season. Oppenheimer is different in several ways from Nolan’s run of hits leading up to it, The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk. It is his longest movie to date—3 hours long. It is rated R. It is almost entirely made up of people talking. It is based on real history. And it is about as bleak as a movie can get.

In the year of bombs, the question is: how did a movie about the atomic bomb and the foreboding thought of nuclear holocaust make nearly a billion dollars and sweep several award ceremonies? What does this say about Christopher Nolan, our contemporary anxieties, and the relationship audiences have with nuclear war going back through popular culture over the past several decades? 

Tom Shone, author of The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan explains the phenomenon of Nolan as one of the only blockbuster auteurs who could not only get a movie like Oppenhemier made but turn it into a huge hit. Then David Craig, author of Apocalypse Television: How The Day After Helped End the Cold War, discusses the use of art to engage with existential threats from Dr. Strangelove to Don’t Look Up, including how The Day After was not only a hit but that it might have saved the world.

The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show features music and clips from Oppenheimer, Barbie, Memento, Dr. Strangelove, and The Day After.

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