Oppenheimer is out on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray and other platforms tomorrow, but if its director had a choice, it’d probably be available to watch on disc only.
Speaking during a Los Angeles screening of Oppenheimer last week, director Christopher Nolan threw a new jab at streaming services, calling them “evil” in front of crew members as he highlighted all of the special attention that his team had given toward the movie’s impending physical releases.
Everyone knows that physical has streaming beat in terms of video and audio quality, but what Nolan seems to be particularly peeved about here is the spontaneity of today’s streaming platforms—or, more specifically, titles suddenly disappearing without a trace—per his statement about how “no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”
Here’s what Nolan had to say, per Variety:
Obviously Oppenheimer has been quite a ride for us and now it is time for me to release a home version of the film. I’ve been working very hard on it for months. I’m known for my love of theatrical and put my whole life into that, but, the truth is, the way the film goes out at home is equally important.
The Dark Knight was one of the first films where we formatted it specially for Blu-ray release because it was a new form at the time. And in the case of Oppenheimer, we put a lot of care and attention into the Blu-ray version… and trying to translate the photography and the sound, putting that into the digital realm with a version you can buy and own at home and put on a shelf so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.
Funny enough, The Dark Knight’s Blu-ray release wasn’t the greatest one, featuring a transfer that was severely over-sharpened in an effort to match its IMAX scenes, but Oppenheimer looks to be one of Nolan’s better efforts, with a gallery of sample screenshots here that show off what the UHD looks like.
In a separate event at CUNY, Nolan suggested that he doesn’t really like the idea of Oppenheimer being regarded as a biopic, although that’s pretty much what it is, telling the story of the American theoretical physicist who later went on to becoming, for better or worse, the “father of the atomic bomb”:
It’s not a useful genre. I love working in useful genres. In this film…it’s the heist film as it applies to the Manhattan Project and the courtroom drama as it applies to the security hearings. It’s very useful to look at the conventions of those genres and how they can pull the audience and how they can give me communication with the audience.
Here’s a portion of Universal Pictures’ description for Oppenheimer, which has earned $950,191,715 worldwide since its release in July, according to figures from Box Office Mojo:
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer is an IMAX-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.
The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. Oscar winner Matt Damon portrays General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey, Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. The film is produced by Emma Thomas, Atlas Entertainment’s Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan.
Oppenheimer is filmed in a combination of IMAX 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography including, for the first time ever, sections in IMAX black and white analogue photography.
Discussion (6 replies)
Join Discussion →I've got no issue with this. Might motivate me to finally reconnect my BD player.
I don't agree with him on a number of things but I do with this. I'm continually saddened by the slow death of 4K physical media. Trying to find an affordable 4K player around $200, or less, that supports automatic DV is like looking for a needle in haystack. There's like two or three manufacturers left that mass produce 4K disc players now and models are rarely updated. To me it seems like prices for movies seem to be going up as well and are even slower to come down than they used to.
It's a shame that the industry thought it best to more or less separate the two products, streaming and physical, as I truly feel that if someone had offered a solid 4K disc player that included most of the options a Fire stick, Roku, or Shield, do that it would've been a huge hit. Instead folks are left having to make a choice of having more devices and costs, and streaming has clearly won.
I wonder what changed in the movie industry because yes prices are much higher than they used to be... because viewership is down. Now theaters are offering 'premium' experiences with food brought to your seat and such. So I imagine they can charge what the market will pay for those experiences to keep money coming in with a lower overall viewership.
Your best bet for a 4K player these days is to buy a console.
I laugh but know that's true.
Well, bad 4k killed 4k.
I honestly don't care a rats butt about any of this.
I did for a while, even got my 4k tv pretty early, hot bluray 4k too ( which died prematurely and got replaced by the cheapest thing in amazon).
Oh I used to look for that hot 4k movie to see in my hot 4k tv, only to see hot garbage.
Crap, just high bitrate garbage. My tv has NEVER been pushed to what it can look like. Perhaps, I only remember a good sharp 4k bluray being '' The Meg" which is an absolute garbage movie in turn, but I may remember it looking sharp.
No streaming didn't kill squat, having no standars in quality killed things. There never was quality above.and beyond a very good dvd, no one bothered to force it, studios never talked about it, they did the laziest, cheapest crap imaginable and pumped out their garbage. Streaming just did the same without disc. If anything streaming is poised to save for 4k as more material is likely recorded as such and just shoved into the server like that. I may pay for 4k netflix one day, ISPs gave up on caps at least for my area.
Dude is living in la la land and is obviously not a regular customer. Perhaps he doesn't even watch TV or has some crap in his house no one has, huge projector like a cinema and such.