Oppenheimer Is The First Box Office Blockbuster To Win Best Picture In 20 Years

It was a huge night for Christopher Nolan at the Academy Awards as his breakthrough hit "Oppenheimer" swept most of the major categories. The film walked away with seven Oscars in total, including Best Picture. In doing so, it became the first out-and-out popular blockbuster to win the night's top prize in 20 years.

"Oppenheimer" made a downright shocking $960 million worldwide as part of the duel phenomenon that was Barbenheimer last year. It ended up as the third-biggest movie of 2023 at the box office overall, trailing only "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" ($1.3 billion) and "Barbie" ($1.44 billion worldwide). It was also by far the least likely of these three films to become such a huge hit as it is not an action-packed film, nor is it based on any treasured IP. It's merely the result of our finest living filmmakers doing his thing on a massive scale. That proved to be more than enough.

The last time a movie this outright popular won Best Picture was when "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" swept Hollywood's biggest night back in 2004. The film concluded Peter Jackson's epic "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and pulled in a then-astounding $1.14 billion globally. Since then, the Oscars have largely avoided giving the biggest prize to the most popular movies. Oddly enough, it was Nolan's own "The Dark Knight" not securing a Best Picture nomination that largely prompted The Academy to expand the category to include 10 films. 15 years later, Nolan has finally gone the distance.

This is not to say other movies that made money haven't won Best Picture in the 2000s (more on that in a moment), but we're talking about a movie that made nearly $1 billion. Even if it is an R-rated, three-hour biopic that's mostly people talking, it's unquestionably populist popcorn cinema as well. It's also the intersection of art and entertainment by way of Nolan as we've come to expect and happens to be the kind of movie that The Academy would honor even if it wasn't a gargantuan blockbuster. Still, that doesn't change the fact that we're dealing with a very mainstream film at the end of the day.

As for recent history, last year's big winner "Everything Everywhere All at Once" ($141 million worldwide) was popular, yes, but it was more of a breakthrough for what should have been an elevated arthouse play from A24. Nolan's film was a $100 million tentpole released by Universal Pictures. The year before that, we had Apple's "CODA," which was a streaming movie with almost no theatrical component. Meanwhile, 2020's "Nomadland" was, sad to say, hampered greatly by the pandemic and hardly registered with mainstream audiences.

Yes, we've had movies like "Green Book" ($321 million worldwide), "The King's Speech" ($424 million worldwide), and Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" ($291 million worldwide) take home Best Picture since 2004. All popular movies, but not in the vicinity of "the most popular" by any stretch of the imagination. Nor did any of those movies even come close to touching the overall global gross of Nolan's latest.

This isn't really about whether or not The Academy got it right. That said, it's a tough movie to argue against. What it means is that a movie that general audiences care about won Best Picture, and that's good for the health of the Academy Awards. And a healthy Academy Awards is good for the future of non-franchise cinema.

"Oppenheimer" is available on Blu-ray and 4K, and is currently streaming on Peacock.