Oppenheimer’s release marks the first time Christopher Nolan has released an R-rated film in over 20 years. That fact might surprise some considering the tone of many of his films, especially with 2008’s The Dark Knight in mind. While Nolan spoke to CinemaBlend’s ReelBlend podcast about settling on a rating for the 2023 new movie release, the filmmaker spoke to the changes he made to the iconic superhero film to make sure it didn’t have an R rating.
Now, we’ve certainly seen a few R-rated superhero movies in recent years that have made bank, including the Deadpool movies, Joker and Logan, but when Nolan’s Batman sequel came out at the time, those successes had yet to come out and Warner Bros. sought to reach a wide audiences with its PG-13 rating. While discussing ratings, Nolan told ReelBlend this about the process involved with one of the best movies of the 2000s. In his words:
When we were making The Dark Knight, for example – which feels like an rated movie – there was a certain amount of negotiation and editing that had to happen to secure the PG-13 rating. Which is often the case with films that are edgy, PG-13 films. That's an area that I've been working in for years. But those are films that you go into with the studio knowing full well that that's the rating you're aiming for. You're aiming for that audience, that breadth of audience. And so you have to change things to make it work. And you have to get clever about how you do things, and how you present violence in the action scenes. Things by implication. Not red blood squibbs, just gray dust squibbs. Things like that. There are all kinds of things that you're doing all along with this.
Nolan’s first three movies, 1998’s Following, 2000’s Memento and 2002’s Insomnia, were all rated R, but since then, his last eight movies prior to Oppenheimer, starting with 2005’s Batman Begins, have been PG-13. Its sequel, The Dark Knight, earned a PG-13 rating for “intense sequences of violence and some menace” ultimately, and became the highest grossing movie worldwide of 2008, making over $1 billion at the box office.
As Nolan shared, getting his movies edited with the purpose of earning a PG-13 rating is a very specific skill he’s been working years on, and gives quite a bit of thought to it between how violence is portrayed or how many f-bombs a movie gets. The Dark Knight Rises was famously almost NC-17, but Christopher Nolan cut a violent death scene out in order to keep it PG-13. But for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan decided early on in the scripting stage that it would work best as an R-rated flick.
Part of that certainly has to do with the fact that this is a movie about the father of the atomic bomb rather than a comic book superhero where toys can be sold. But Nolan’s fourth R-rated movie isn’t a high rating because of a crazy amount of violence; instead, it’s reportedly because of “sexuality, nudity, and language.” You can check out ReelBlend’s interview with Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer in the below YouTube video:
Across the interview, Nolan also shared his thoughts on Quentin Tarantino’s retirement plans, how Sir Ridley Scott influenced his filmmaking career, and the process of making Oppenheimer, of course. Ahead of the movie’s release this Friday, July 21, check out the first reactions for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer here on CinemaBlend.
