Oppenheimer’s IMAX print is 11 miles long, which will get you from Manhattan to a KFC in the Bronx

Christopher Nolan has made long movies before, but how about a movie deeper than the Mariana Trench?

Oppenheimer’s IMAX print is 11 miles long, which will get you from Manhattan to a KFC in the Bronx
Oppenheimer Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Measuring the length of a movie in minutes isn’t cool anymore. It’s played out. It’s over. It belongs in a trash heap with silent films and everything that isn’t part of an interconnected superhero universe. No, the cool way to measure the length of a movie is now in its literal length. Inches and feet! We don’t care how long a movie is, we want to know how long it is.

So, with that comedic premise established, we are very excited to share that the IMAX prints of Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb biopic Oppenheimer are 11 miles long. That’s long as hell! Or at least it seems pretty long for a movie. This Variety story also says that the IMAX prints weigh around 600 pounds, which is 600 pounds heavier than most non-IMAX movies today since they’re sent to theaters on hard drives or given to theaters digitally. Those movies are not long—in terms of distance—at all, which is boring.

But it can be hard to visualize just how long 11 miles is, so in the interest of conveying the actual length of Nolan’s Oppenheimer, here’s a list of other things that are 11 miles long:

  • The distance between the Empire State Building and this KFC in the Bronx
  • A little more than five laps of the iconic Circuit De Monaco racetrack
  • The distance between the Eiffel Tower and this French McDonald’s
  • This In-N-Out Burger is 11 miles from LAX, and there are at least five closer In-N-Out Burgers
  • Darth Vader’s flagship, the Executor Super Star Destroyer, is actually 12 miles long
  • About 11 miles from St. Peter’s Basilica, where The Pope hangs his hat, there is a Burger King
  • If you start at the northernmost tip of Chicago’s famous Magnificent Mile and go straight down for 11 miles, you’ll end up between two different McDonald’s locations
  • If you head directly west from Matamata, New Zealand, a filming location for The Shire in The Lord Of The Rings, you and your merry fellowship will reach the town of Cambridge. It has a KFC, a McDonald’s, a Subway, and a Domino’s Pizza. Take the the ring into that KFC and throw it into the fiery chasm from whence it came!
  • If you went out into the ocean near Guam and swam straight down for 11 miles, you would hit the bottom of the Mariana Trench and break through into the undersea world where The Meg lives.
  • If you stacked more than 1,000 IMAX screens on top of each other, it would be… a little less than 11 miles, depending on how big they are. The math on this one is a little weird.
  • If you stacked 10,000 Christopher Nolans on top of each other, it would be 11 miles long. You’d need slightly more Cillian Murphys, though, since he’s an inch shorter.
  • The entire length of Alamogordo, New Mexico, closest town to the site of the world’s first atomic bomb explosion, is about 11 miles. That’s actually crazy for real. We’re freaking out right now.

Oppenheimer will also be Nolan’s first R-rated movie since 2002’s Insomnia (a film that takes place in Nightmute, Alaska, which is 11 miles from… not a whole lot). You can see this length for yourself when Oppenheimer opens in IMAX (and regular theaters) on July 21.

 
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