If you’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time like I have, you might be wondering: does Oppenheimer have an end-credits scene?
Oppenheimer is a mammoth of a film, starring an ensemble cast like Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt, Jack Quaid, Matt Damon, Rami Malek, and plenty more stars. The biopic is about the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer who helped propel the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan to end World War II. The film is directed by renowned director Christopher Nolan and the running time is about three hours. To ensure your Barbenheimer experience goes well, here’s if you should stick after the credits as we reveal if Oppenheimer has an end-credits scene.
Does Oppenheimer have an end-credits scene?
Does Oppenheimer have an end-credits scene? No, Oppenheimer doesn’t have an end-credits scene. In fact, none of Christopher Nolan’s films has an end credits scene.
Nolan’s decision to not use an after-credits scene was attributed to a Guardian article in 2014 during the release of Interstellar. “When the studio asked if Snyder would add a comedy coda ending, in the style of Marvel, Nolan’s reply was ‘A real movie wouldn’t do that,’” the publication wrote. Nolan himself disputed it saying, “I would never say someone else’s film isn’t ‘a real film.’ The quote is inaccurate.”
Though it might not have an end-credits scene, Nolan advises the audience to stick around to reflect after Oppenheimer. “Some people leave the movie absolutely devastated,” Nolan said about early screenings to Wired. “They can’t speak. I mean, there’s an element of fear that’s there in the history and there in the underpinnings. But the love of the characters, the love of the Relationships, is as strong as I’ve ever done.” Nolan later added, “It is an intense experience because it’s an intense story. I showed it to a filmmaker recently who said it’s kind of a horror movie. I don’t disagree.”
On if he’s proud of the film, he said, “I do now that I—you know, I was relieved to be finished with it, actually. But I enjoy watching the film tremendously. I think you’ll understand when you see the film. It’s a complicated set of feelings to be entertained by awful things, you know? Which is where the horror dimension comes in.”
Nolan teamed up with frequent collaborator Cillian Murphy on Oppenheimer. On their Relationship, Murphy told Deadline, “I’d always secretly wanted to play a lead for Chris. I think any actor in the whole world would want to be in a Chris Nolan movie, not to mind play a lead for him, and we have such a long relationship. I mean, it’s 20 years. It was 2003 that I first met him, so (laughs) it makes us old – it’s a long time.”
He continued, “He’s not the sort of person that would call me up and talk and shoot the shit. He’s just working and it just felt right this one – and maybe there was some sort of physical resemblance, I don’t know. People seem to think there was, but he just seemed to think that the time was right.”
On his approach to working with actors, Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter, “People will say, ‘Why do you work in secrecy?’ Well, it’s not secrecy, it’s privacy. It’s being able to try things, to make mistakes, to be as adventurous as possible. And to be able to sit with somebody who’s just read what you’ve written and get their take on it, see how they connect with it in a very human, face-to-face way.” Robert Downey Jr. went to Nolan’s home in L.A. to read the script. “I was like, ‘Wow,’ ” Downey told the site. “And he was like, ‘So will you do it?’ I was like, ‘Uh, usually, there’s 38 phone calls.’ But he’s Chris Nolan. So I was like, ‘Yeah, I think I will.’ ”
The Tenet director also had his favorite collaborators in mind when writing the script. “I’ve been staring at the cover of the book American Prometheus for so many months, and there’s this photograph, black and white, a light blue-eyed stare, very intense, of this guy,” Nolan said comparing Oppenheimer to Murphy. “And I thought, ‘Well, I know who could do that.’ ”
Emily Blunt gushed over working with The Dark Knight director and would have answered a call from him in a heartbeat. “It’s so pulsating when you know he wants to meet you,” she told Collider. “It’s the best feeling ever because he’s so extraordinary, he’s of such vast talent and ability, you know you’re going to be a part of a film that is lasting. In whatever capacity that is. So, I was thrilled to meet him. He’s just a cool guy, as well. We talked for hours even before he gave me the script. I went to his living room and I read the script, then we talked more afterwards. I think that’s what I love most about him, the curiosity in the process, the passion for it, the passion for actors and what you need, and to take away all the chaos from you even though I’m sure to keep all the plates in the air of shooting a film of this scale, he must have had endless plates in the air. He must have had a hurricane going on inside of him throughout the whole process.”
Matt Damon concurred, “It’s the biggest story of our lives, maybe in the history of the human species so far, told by a director who’s at the absolute top of his game, with one of the great screen performances at the center of it. Chris always said to us when we were making it, “I need you guys in support.” That’s the mission, basically, is supporting Cillian [Murphy]. This whole movie hinges on that performance. It’ll resonate emotionally if we’re with that character. He wrote the script in the first-person, which I’d never seen before. So, instead of saying, ‘Oppenheimer walked across the room,’ it’s, ‘I walk across the room.’ It just ripped you into that world, and given what’s at stake, there’s not a more important story out there.”
The definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress. In this magisterial, acclaimed biography twenty-five years in the making, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War. This is biography and history at its finest, riveting and deeply informative. See why the New York Times says it’s “a work of voluminous scholarship and lucid insight, unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s essential nature… It succeeds in deeply fathoming his most damaging, self-contradictory behavior.”
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