Matt Damon confirms Oppenheimer runtime – and it may be Christopher Nolan’s longest movie yet

Oppenheimer
(Image credit: Paramount)

Matt Damon has confirmed that Christopher Nolan's next movie, Oppenheimer, is around three hours long – which means it may be the director's longest film yet. Currently, Nolan's longest movie is Interstellar, which has a runtime of 169 minutes, followed by The Dark Knight Rises, which is 165 minutes.

"It’s three hours. It’s fantastic," Damon told Variety, after revealing that he’d seen the movie. "Cillian [Murphy] is phenomenal. He’s everything you would want him to be," he added. "I think it’s almost three hours. It goes so fast, it’s great."

Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist and head of the secret Los Alamos Laboratory during the war – and the man who developed the atom bomb. He was heavily involved with the Manhattan Project, which is credited with developing the first nuclear weapons used to bomb the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Damon will play United States Army Corps of Engineers officer Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project who also oversaw the construction of the Pentagon.

Alongside Damon, the star-studded cast also includes Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Jack Quaid, Alden Ehrenreich, and Kenneth Branagh. 

According to Universal Studios, Oppenheimer is an "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."

Oppenheimer arrives on the big screen on July 21. While we wait, fill out your watch list with our picks of the other best upcoming movies on the way in 2023 and beyond.

Entertainment Writer

I’m an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering everything film and TV-related across the Total Film and SFX sections. I help bring you all the latest news and also the occasional feature too. I’ve previously written for publications like HuffPost and i-D after getting my NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism.