Christopher Nolan is a household name in the world of #ENTERTAINMENT, who doesn’t know him?
Believe it or not, Christopher Nolan has never added a post-credits scene to one of his films. Over 12 movies and 25 years in the industry, the Oppenheimer director refuses to succumb to the big-budget filmmaking trend. Hell, Nolan even directed a superhero trilogy—and not a single one of them deployed a post-credits tease for another film. Remember that scene where Joseph Gordon-Levitt rises into the Batcave? That scene was in the movie.
So, it goes without saying that Oppenheimer—Nolan’s latest film about the famous WWII nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer—does not feature a post-credits scene. You already sat in that theater for three hours. Just go home. Or watch Barbie! I know you’re going to see both on the same day. You can’t hide it from me. Everyone has plans.
For the most part, all the time-jumping doesn’t inspire confusion, and rather contributes to the film’s athletic pacing. Oppenheimer’s third act revolves around a pair of hearings: one, in 1954, over whether to renew Oppenheimer’s security clearance; and the other, over Strauss’s (Robert Downey Jr., your 2024 Best Supporting Actor) confirmation.
Nolan sprinkles the various depositions earlier in the film as narration. We hear different characters describe why Oppenheimer was eventually chosen to run the Manhattan Project (his unparalleled genius at theoretical physics) despite being a risky choice for the position (his womanizing, plus his flirtations with communism).
Of course, Oppenheimer would also be an incredibly odd film for Nolan to run a post-credits scene. If three hours of story isn’t enough, we’ve got a problem. This isn’t Robert Caro working on Lyndon B. Johnson biographies—over four separate books—for a lifetime.
Oppenheimer is a movie—and it’s a full story. Sure, it also features the great Albert Einstein (and Oppenheimer does form an Avengers-esque group of nuclear physicists to build the bomb), but there’s no Oppenheimer will return in WWIII teaser. At least with Nolan, you can trust that the post-credits trend will not live on.