Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” clocks in at 3 hours, and that seems to be the exact runtime Nolan intended to be seen in cheaters.
There will be no director’s cut of “Oppenheimer,” nor will there be deleted scenes because, according to star Cillian Murphy, they don’t exist. Here is Murphy talking about this, via Collider:
“There’s no deleted scenes in Chris Nolan movies. That’s why there are no DVD extras on his movies because the script is the movie. He knows exactly what’s going to end up – he’s not fiddling around with it trying to change the story. That is the movie.”
“Oppenheimer” was a major risk for Universal. It cost $100 million, clocks in at 180 minutes, is boldly structured and its subject matter utterly adult-oriented. Thank the cinematic heavens that “Barbeheimer” happened. The film has so far made $200 million domestically.
Nolan also tends to shoot in film, which, in itself, is both expensive and risky. In 2020, Nolan told MTV that he can’t afford to shoot extra scenes, he needs to adhere to the script and deleted scenes rarely, if ever, happen in his films:
“I tend to try and weed things out on paper because it’s crazy expensive to shoot things that aren’t going to be in the film,” the director “It also takes up a lot of time and energy. Pretty much with all my films, there are very few deleted scenes, which always disappoints the DVD crowd.”
I would imagine that ever since Nolan hit it big with “The Dark Knight,” he’s had the creative freedom to do whatever the hell he wants. No other filmmaker could get big-budgeted film like “Inception” and “Tenet” made in this climate.