Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer' Pay Nears $100M After Oscar Bonus: Report

Director Christopher Nolan has reportedly received nearly $100 million for his work on Oppenheimer.

After the movie picked up seven Oscars on Sunday, March 10, Variety reported that Nolan’s final bonuses will bring his pay to just shy of nine figures, which also includes “salary, backend compensation [and] box-office escalators.”

It might be an understatement to say Oppenheimer has made a lot of money for Universal. The historical drama, which follows the true story of J. Robert Oppenheimer as he created the atomic bomb, was made for $100 million and has earned more than $950 million at the box office since it hit theaters in July 2023.

Universal is planning a rerelease of the film on the big screen in celebration of sweeping the 2024 Academy Awards. The return to theaters is expected to push the worldwide box-office haul above $1 billion and will reportedly trigger another bonus for Nolan, 53, who also produced the film with wife Emma Thomas.

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Best Picture winners rarely make so much at the box office. Oppenheimer is the first Best Picture winner to take home more than $100 million at the box office since 2012’s Argo ($232 million worldwide) and the highest-grossing Best Picture winner since 2004’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ($1.15 billion worldwide). Titanic is the only Best Picture winner that out-earned Oppenheimer and The Return of the King ($2.26 billion worldwide).

Though Oppenheimer was widely predicted to sweep the Oscars, Nolan was overjoyed when accepting the best director statue on Sunday during the ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

He praised the film’s “incredible cast” including Robert Downey Jr. and Cillian Murphy, who took home the statues for Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor, respectively.

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“A crew, some of who, have been rewarded tonight, I can’t say enough about the incredible crew that we got together on this film,” Nolan shared. He also gave shout-outs to Universal and the authors of American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, who wrote the book that inspired Oppenheimer.

He ended his speech by thanking his wife, “the incredible Emma Thomas,” who serves as a “producer of all our films and all our children.” (The couple, who wed in 1997, share four children.)

Thomas, meanwhile, took the mic to accept Best Picture at the end of the night. “I think any of us who make movies know that you kind of dream of this moment, you know you do, right? I could deny it, but I have been dreaming about this moment for so long,” Thomas, 52, said during the acceptance speech. “But it seemed so unlikely that it would ever actually happened. And now I’m standing here and everything’s kind of gone out of my head.”

She continued, “The reason this movie was the movie that it was was Chris Nolan. He is singular, he is brilliant and I’m so grateful to you.”