The 11 Biggest Box

Chistopher Nolan is one of the highest-profile directors working in Hollywood today, a reliable box-office draw even when he’s not making movies about Batman. However, things have changed recently: His last movie, Tenet, underperformed (though it was admittedly released during the height of the pandemic), and Nolan went through a split with his longtime studio, Warner Bros., after a public dustup over releasing movies to streaming rather than in cinemas. Now, he’s opening Oppenheimer, an expensive, three-hour, R-rated historical drama, opposite Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, one of the most anticipated and memed movies of the year. Tracking information has Oppenheimer expected to open to $49 million, a respectable amount, but it would be Nolan’s lowest opening since The Prestige, not counting Tenet.

With the overall 2023 box office still expected to be significantly below its pre-pandemic highs, Nolan’s latest venture — which has a budget of $100 million — isn’t quite as risky as hitting the detonator on an experimental atomic weapon that might cause a chain reaction and destroy the world … but it’s close. As Oppenheimer prepares to step into the ring opposite Barbie, it feels fitting to look back at some of the biggest box-office bombs of all time.

The Caped Crusader’s feature-film debut took everything about Adam West’s campy take on the superhero from the ’60s TV show and made it bigger — and that included explosives. In the most iconic scene of the charmingly (and intentionally!) silly film, Batman enters a villain’s lair only to find a giant cartoonish bomb with the fuse already lit. He picks it up over his head and scrambles around looking for a place to safely dispose of it, only to be thwarted at every turn by innocent bystanders like nuns or baby ducks. “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb,” Batman says — a line that rivals “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

It’s too early to tell if Oppenheimer will be an Oscar contender, so for now Kathryn Bigelow’s war-on-terror drama is still the Academy Awards’ most explosive Best Picture winner. Jeremy Renner plays Sergeant First Class William James, a talented but thrill-seeking EOD technician, which kind of makes him the opposite of Oppenheimer’s titular bomb builder. The IEDs James defuses (or attempts to defuse, as in the tense final set piece) may not look like much, but they’re deadly.

The bomb that Dennis Hopper’s Howard Payne rigs up to an L.A. bus isn’t the biggest the movies have ever seen, nor is it, despite the name, the fastest. Fifty miles per hour is quick, but it’s nothing compared with the speed of an atomic bomb dropped from a plane, as we’ll get to shortly. Still, by turning a bus into a big bomb on wheels, Speed has earned a (parking) spot in the hall of big box-office bombs.

(This seems like a good place to give Unstoppable an honorable mention, as although the runaway train loaded with explosive chemicals is “a missile the size of the Chrysler Building,” it’s not technically a bomb and thus not eligible for this list.)

Gadget, the device that exploded at the Trinity Test, has the distinction of being the only nonfictional bomb on this list (though The Hurt Locker’s IEDs are based on real devices). So why isn’t Oppenheimer higher here? Because as big and destructive as the first atomic bombs were, they were so devastating because of how compact they put their explosive force. Gadget fits 25,000 tons of TNT explosive force into a small package. There would be atomic bombs that are smaller, like the popularized-in-Fallout Davey Crocket’s 20 ton warhead, and there would be bigger nukes that are much bigger, like old ICBM warheads measured in megatons, but gadget is the first, and actually quite small compared with the bombs that came after — and while bigger bombs in fiction are fun, in real life they’re kind of existentially terrifying.

Given that Nolan supposedly didn’t use CGI for Oppenheimer’s big explosion, the actual bomb from Oppenheimer probably also deserves a spot on this ranking.

There’s not a more iconic bomb in all of cinema than the H-bomb Slim Pickens rides, hooting and hollering with a cowboy hat the whole way, as he plunges to his death and ushers in the nuclear apocalypse. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film — which is both a hilarious comedy and deeply, deeply upsetting — left a lasting impression on the public consciousness, though so far it hasn’t lasted quite as long as the 93 years of nuclear fallout the Soviets’ doomsday device unleashes upon the world.

Man, Batman really can’t get rid of a bomb, can he? And Nolan loves a big blast. Some 46 years after Adam West’s Batman ran around a pier with an oversize bomb, Christian Bale’s Dark Knight fought Bane for control over a fusion-reactor core that was transformed into a decaying neutron bomb. The threat of explosion holds Gotham City hostage, and in the end, Batman must fly off with the bomb in tow, seemingly sacrificing himself to prevent the destruction of Gotham. The fire rises indeed.

Frequently, big bombs in movies are bad news for the planet (there’s that “destroyer of worlds” thing again). But in Armageddon, a group of oil drillers (?) train to become astronauts (?) so they can fly to an approaching asteroid and plant a powerful (if malfunction-prone) nuke deep in its core so it’ll split in half and spare Earth from, uh, Armageddon. Never mind that in real life, blowing up a nuke in the middle of an asteroid would not actually do that.

The Core — which is basically Armageddon but “down” instead of “up” and even dumber, if you can believe it — is another movie in which big ol’ bombs save the world instead of blowing it to bits. When Earth’s molten core stops spinning, the magnetic field disappears, leaving the planet open to devastating solar radiation. A team of scientists, including Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, and Stanley Tucci, make their way into the depths of the planet, where they need to detonate five 200-megaton explosive devices to jump-start the core.

Armageddon and The Core’s big bombs are outliers. Most bombs in movies are bad, and the many bombs that go off in the sci-fi disaster film The Day the Earth Caught Fire are bad news in a novel way: The many, many U.S. and Soviet bomb tests throw the planet off its axis and out of orbit, sending it slowly toward the Sun where everyone will burn up. The only solution? To … blow up a good chunk of Earth’s entire nuclear arsenal in Siberia to set the planet back on course. So I guess the big bombs save the day in this one, too, but it was their fault to begin with.

After the original movie revealed that Charleton Heston’s astronaut had been stranded not on an alien world ruled by gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans but instead on Earth far in the future, the second Planet of the Apes film ends with the destruction of said ape-filled planet. We learn that while most humans are basically mute cattle, some mutated, telekinetic humans survived a long-ago nuclear apocalypse and currently live underground in the ruins of New York City. When the ape armies track them down, the mutants attempt to end it all by detonating the AΩ doomsday bomb they worship — a device so powerful it can destroy the whole world. And, well, there’s a reason all the Apes movies after this were time-traveling prequels.

There are big bombs and then there’s the bomb in Sunshine, which has a mass equivalent to Manhattan Island, took half of all the fissile material on Earth to build, and is actually the second such bomb humanity made in an attempt to stop the sun from dying out. So unfortunately for Oppenheimer, the atomic bomb is far, far from the biggest bomb Cillian Murphy has created.