Good news, Oppenheimer will likely be shorter on Binge

Oppenheimer will hit Binge on March 22nd, and chances are it will be about seven minutes shorter than the cinematic release. No, they haven’t chosen to cut that Florence Pugh scene, it is purely due to the streaming platform’s encoding.

Australian broadcasting - including the slew of Hubbl’s (previously Stream Motion) uses PAL encoding which utilises a frame rate of 25 frames per second. Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster was shot at 24fps, so in order to show the film those 24 frames will need to fit into 25 frames per second instead. Commonly this is done by speeding up the playback by just over 4%.

Astute redditors pointed out the practice in Binge’s Succession broadcasting last year, when the final episode clocked in at two and a half minutes shorter than other versions. In Oppenheimer’s case, the three hour run time should come down to 172 minutes and 30 seconds- saving you seven and a half minutes over the course of the film.

Most Succession episodes now look to align with the stated run times, but according to Foxtel Media’s ad specs for Binge the platform does still use a 25fps rate. We wouldn’t put it past Christopher Nolan to provide a 25fps or 50fps version of Oppenheimer, but no such version is currently available on the market. We reached out to confirm the frame rate for the upcoming release, but Binge didn’t respond to our request for comment.