"Can Napoleon Be Another Oppenheimer?": A Follow-Up

As I remarked in a post last month seeing the ads for Napoleon I found myself thinking of Oppenheimer--both films being biographical epics about major historical figures, a genre not known to do too well at the American box office. Oppenheimer surprised everyone on that score--and I wondered whether Napoleon might not do the same.

I saw two reasons to doubt it right away--namely that whereas Napoleon helmer Ridley Scott is a respected, veteran, director, he has no cheering section out there ready to praise to the skies anything he does the way Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan does, which probably did a lot to help sell the movie; while if the story of Napoleon and the events of his time have undeniable meaning for the world today, there seemed little playing up of any such "relevance" in the media next to the way they compared the advent of the nuclear age to the unhinged hyping of text-spitting chatbots when talking about Nolan's film.

As it happened, the Boxoffice Pro projections for the movie, in spite of fluctuations over the past month, remain pretty much where they were four weeks ago (with a 3-day opening in the vicinity of $16-$21 merely risen to one of $17-$23 million, and even the high end of the range projected for the film's overall run still in the $70-$80 million range). Meanwhile critics are not exactly gushing about the movie, the film's Rotten Tomatoes score a mere 68 percent. By contrast the projection for Oppenheimer, reflecting the tracking data, surged some 30 percent in the month before release, from $40-$55 million to $52-$72 million in the opening weekend alone--a feat the more impressive because it came out the same weekend as the even more performing #1 hit of the year, Barbie--while critical enthusiasm was such as to produce a 93 percent score (with some of that praise won in surprising places, I might add).

Of course, with the film only coming out now it has some room to surprise us--but that room is dwindling fast, domestically at least. (The international markets, traditionally more receptive to historical films like this one, may be another matter.)