If you enjoy having a beverage during a film screening, you might need to reconsider if you plan on watching Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer in a theater.

According to a report by Julia Alexander from Puck News, the upcoming biopic has an expected runtime of approximately three hours, making it the longest film to date by the British-American filmmaker. At the moment, Nolan's 2014 sci-fi epic, Interstellar, holds the record for the longest runtime, with a duration of 169 minutes.

Although it's unusual for blockbuster films to approach a three-hour runtime, last year saw an increase in films averaging nearly three hours.

For instance, MCU's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever had a runtime of 161 minutes, over half an hour longer than its predecessor. Matt Reeves' DC reboot of The Batman was 176 minutes long, while Damien Chazelle's period drama Babylon had a lengthy runtime of 188 minutes. Meanwhile, James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water set both the highest-grossing film record and the longest runtime record of 2022, clocking in at a whopping 190 minutes!

The trend of lengthy movies seems set to continue in 2023, as evidenced by the 169-minute runtime for John Wick: Chapter 4. However, given the subject matter of Oppenheimer, it is not surprising that Nolan's latest film has a lengthy runtime.

The upcoming biopic centers around J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist known as the "father of the atomic bomb." Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory and key to the Manhattan Project, which was responsible for developing the world's first nuclear weapons.

Oppenheimer features an ensemble cast led by Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Rami Malek, Florence Pugh, Robert Downey Jr., and Matt Damon, among others.

Nolan has described the film as "one of the most challenging projects" he's done because of its scale. The renowned director is known for his preference for practical effects and opted to use real explosives to recreate the Trinity nuclear test, forgoing the much safer CGI approach.

Oppenheimer, set to release on July 21, will mark the director's first film in over two decades that won't be distributed by Warner Bros. Discovery, as a result of an in-studio row between the two parties.