Jammu and Kashmir: Oppenheimer wins hearts, Inox Srinagar witnesses Hollywood's first full house

Srinagar's only multiplex is sold out for the next three days, making Oppenheimer the biggest release in Kashmir after Shah Rukh Khan's Pathaan, reports NDTV.

Even before the film was released tickets at Srinagar's INOX - the only multiplex in Kashmir- its tickets got sold out, the Indian news channel reported.

The official Twitter page of Inox Srinagar posted: " A remarkable cinematic milestone as 'Oppenheimer' becomes the first Hollywood movie to achieve a full house at INOX Srinagar." '"Oppenheimer" has captured the hearts of Kashmiri cinephiles," read the tweet further.

Vikas Dhar, who runs Kashmir’s lone cinema theatre in association with Inox, said Oppenheimer is doing very well.

“Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Pathaan had attracted a huge rush at our cinema. We are quite surprised that Hollywood movie is attracting movie goers in Kashmir in such a large number," he told UNI.

"Yesterday and today we had a full house. Tomorrow we are expecting a big crowd,” he said, adding even before the release of the movie the tickets had sold out.

“It has been a learning for us that youth of Kashmir are preferring Hollywood movies also. It is quite a thrilling experience,” Dhar said.

The multiplex at Srinagar Shivpora was reopened last year after a gap of 33 years.

In 1989 when militancy erupted in Kashmir, a little known militant outfit "Allah Tigers" imposed a ban on the film screening in the Valley and all the 13 cinemas including nine in Srinagar stopped screening of films.

In 1999, the J&K government offered packages to the theater owners for re-opening of cinemas. Three of them – Broadway, Regal and Neelam (all in Srinagar) re-opened . All the three were later shut after a cine-goer was killed in a grenade attack.

The union territory government plans to establish cinemas in every district of the region and already several multipurpose cinema halls have been reopened in several districts of Kashmir.

Only last week, Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha inaugurated 100-seater multipurpose cinema halls in Baramulla and Handwara towns of north Kashmir

Based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the film chronicles the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist who was pivotal in developing the first nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project, and thereby ushering in the Atomic Age.

Cillian Murphy stars as the titular character, with Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer's wife, Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer's military handler, and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, a senior member of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Other members of the supporting cast include Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, and Kenneth Branagh.