Topping the list of most-viewed movies on Wikipedia is one of the year’s biggest blockbusters. The critical and financial reception to Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” aided the epic biopic in becoming a winner on the reference site with 28,348,248 page views. Along with topping Wikipedia’s film articles, it also ranks as its fifth overall most-read piece overall.
The film recounts physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) time as director of the Manhattan Project and the controversy that followed during the 1954 security hearings. Bringing in a worldwide total of over $950 million, “Oppenheimer” broke records as 2023’s third-highest grosser, the second-highest grossing R-rated film of all time after 2019’s “Joker,” and the highest-grossing biopic ever made. Being a Christopher Nolan-directed film with an A-list ensemble cast certainly helped it find success, but much of its box office greatness can be attributed to its simultaneous release with “Barbie” on July 21, birthing the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon that saw moviegoers flood theaters to view the two blockbusters with disparate themes. This resulted in the fourth-biggest box office weekend ever.
In line with its financial performance, “Oppenheimer” has also been a knockout with critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 93% Tomatometer score, with viewers responding positively to Nolan’s masterful direction and the powerhouse performances of Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., and Emily Blunt. The film garnered some controversy regarding its historical accuracy and the omission of Japanese or Native American points of view within its narrative. Nevertheless, as any good biopic should do, “Oppenheimer” got many viewers interested in the movie’s real-world subject. Not far off from the film itself, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Wikipedia article ranks as the seventh most-viewed piece of the year with over 25.6 million reads.
