When Will Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer Stream on Peacock?

Peacock will become the exclusive streaming home of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer starting Friday, February 16, the NBCUniversal platform announced today. Six Nolan classics — Memento (2000), Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Dunkirk (2017) — are set to join the service Thursday, February 1.

If you can’t wait for its streaming debut, the acclaimed World War II biopic/thriller chronicling the life and career of leading Manhattan Project scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer (portrayed by longtime Nolan collaborator, Cillian Murphy) is now available to own from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. The home edition contains three hours of bonus features.

RELATED: Did Oppenheimer’s Oval Office Look Familiar? How Nolan Biopic Borrowed Veep Set in Last Minute Save

Hailed by critics and audiences as a masterpiece of modern cinema (it currently holds a near-perfect 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes), Oppenheimer made close to $1 billion at the global box office, making it the highest-grossing biopic of all time. In addition, the film recently took home a total of five Golden Globes, including Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Director.

What is Oppenheimer about?

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 3-hour historical epic tells the story of the famed theoretical physicist who led the American effort to develop the world’s first atomic weapon ahead of the Nazis. As head of the top-secret Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer works closely with General Leslie Groves (played by Matt Damon) to recruit the country’s brightest scientific minds and sequester them at the clandestine laboratory at Los Alamos.

RELATED: Oppenheimer at the Golden Globes: Nolan’s Biopic Wins For Best Drama, Director, Stars and More

When Germany surrenders in May 1945, however, President Truman (Gary Oldman makes a brief cameo as FDR’s successor) uses the two bombs to end the war in the Pacific Theatre. The irradiated horrors brought upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki elicit a profound sense of guilt in Oppenheimer, whose support for a nuclear arsenal wanes in the early years of the Cold War. Since this is the McCarthy era of rampant paranoia and blacklists, the man is stripped of his high-level security clearance and branded an unpatriotic subversive — a black mark that wasn’t removed from Oppenheimer’s public record until late 2022.

“What I wanted to do was take the audience into the mind and the experience of a person who sat at the absolute center of the largest shift in history,” Nolan explains in the production notes. “Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for better or for worse. And his story must be seen to be believed.”

Who Stars in Oppenheimer?

Featuring one of the most impressive ensemble casts in recent memory, Oppenheimer co-stars Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey, Jr., Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Michael Angarano, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh, David Dastmalchian, Dane DeHaan, Jason Clarke, Benny Safdie, Gustaf Skarsgård, David Krumholtz, Olivia Thirlby, Tony Goldwyn, Casey Affleck, Dylan Arnold, David Krumholtz, Tom Conti, James D’Arcy, Josh Peck, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthias Schweighöfer, Matthew Modine, Danny Deferrari, Michael Angaran, Jack Quaid, and Gary Oldman.

“Cillian Murphy playing Oppenheimer was the centerpiece of the film. But I knew that Cillian was going to need the most extraordinary ensemble around him, great actors who could challenge him and push him,” Nolan adds. “In a film with so many different faces, each one had to be distinctive and credible. So, the breadth of the ensemble that casting director John Papsidera put together is a huge feature of the film. It’s hugely important for the audience to be able to track who’s doing what and who’s important in what way. These actors had to come to set every day with a tight, specific knowledge of their character’s role in things, what contribution they made to the Manhattan Project, what they brought to a particular meeting, experiment, or argument on a particular day.”

How to Subscribe to Peacock

The NBCUniversal platform currently offers two monthly subscription plans: Premium ($5.99 a month with ads) and Premium Plus ($11.99 a month with no ads and download access for certain titles). If you’re a student, you can enjoy the Premium plan for just $1.99 for an entire year!

Looking for some theatrical action in the meantime? The Holdovers, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, The Exorcist: Believer, Fast X, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and Strays are all streaming on Peacock!