Oppenheimer Smashes Box Office Record For Oscar Winners

Since Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King took home the Best Picture win in 2004, no other Best Picture winner has crossed the $500 million mark. Oppenheimer handily shot past that mark with a global take of $957 million.

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King holds the top spot still with $1.15 billion worldwide.

Amazingly, Oppenheimer’s $957 million was only the second-highest box office take out of the Best Picture nominees this year.

The nominee that brought home the most bucks at the box office was Oppenheimer’s was none other than Barbie, which it shared an opening weekend with this summer.

While two major blockbusters may typically want to avoid sharing an opening weekend due to competition, these two actually fueled each other thanks to the Barbenheimer social media craze. 

If Barbie had won the Best Picture award over Oppenheimer, it would have become the highest-grossing Oscar winner of all time.

Greta Gerwig’s film took home a whopping $1.4 billion at the international box office, making it the highest-grossing movie of the year and the 14th highest-grossing movie of all time.

Barbie was nominated for eight Oscars and took home the Best Original Song Oscar for Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”

Meanwhile, Oppenheimer was nominated for 13 Oscars and ended up taking home quite a few awards. Along with Best Picture, Cillian Murphy won for Best Actor, Christopher Nolan won for Best Director, and Robert Downey Jr. won for Best Supporting Actor.

It also took home Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score.

Other than Oppenheimer, the only other films with more than one win were Poor Things and The Zone of Interest. Poor Things came in second with four awards, including Best Actress for Emma Stone, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling. The Zone of Interest won two with Best International Feature Film and Best Sound. 

Other winners for the night included The Holdovers, American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Boy and the Heron, Godzilla Minus One, 20 Days in Mariupol, War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko, and The Last Repair Shop.

It’s safe to say that this year was definitely the year that blockbusters like Oppenheimer reigned, both with the critics and at the box office. It’s not often that the Best Picture winner also makes nearly a billion dollars, and it’s also rare that it goes up against another movie that made over a billion dollars.

In any case, both Barbie and Oppenheimer’s nominations and wins were well deserved. Audiences and the Academy don’t always agree, but this year they did. It might be a while before we see another near-billion-dollar Best Picture winner.