Making nearly $1 billion worldwide, Oppenheimer would have been a Netflix hit just as well, says the company’s CCO.

A three-hour movie about the guy who brought the world the atomic bomb wouldn’t seem like a contender for one of the highest-grossing movies of its year, but Oppenheimer was just that. And without that sort of theatrical release, it may not have had the impact that it did…Unless you put Oppenheimer on Netflix, of course, in which it still would have been a massive hit. Just ask Netflix!

Recently sitting down with Puck’s Matt Belloni, Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria laid out the strategy the company would have taken had it been behind Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. “We would have done an amazing qualifying run. So many people obviously would have watched it. It was a great movie. And I think it would have had that.”

Comparing ticket sales to streaming numbers is almost impossible, as there are just too many factors to take into account. But this is just the sort of argument that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos tried to make before, saying that Barbenheimer would have done just as well on the streaming service, neglecting to consider that nobody would have cared if Barbie and Oppenheimer dropped on Netflix on the same day or not since they both would have just felt like two more movies they tossed in the rotation.

Adding to her reasoning on why Oppenheimer would have crushed it on Netflix had it been given the chance, Bajaria said, “We’re going to totally disagree about this. And here’s the thing: There’s a lot of people who love going to the movies. I love going to the movies. It’s just, we want to make great movies on Netflix. This idea of, everything theatrical is bigger and lasting, you have to think about all those other movies…” For numbers sake, Oppenheimer grossed $975 million worldwide, which equates to…how many Netflix streams, exactly? Exactly.

Netflix can try to make this case all they want, but we’d really love to hear what kind of box office numbers original releases like La Dolce Villa and Kinda Pregnant would be doing if they weren’t straight to streaming…

What do you think of Netflix’s stance on movies like Oppenheimer? Does it have any weight at all?