Can you really imagine China allowing a film about U.S. military superiority to succeed within China? I haven't seen it, but unless it paints the U.S. in a bad light I cannot imagine them allowing it to be released and not hampered in some way where they can have deniability over its performance. Even if the film is anti-U.S. (and I doubt it is) on the outside it's about the U.S. beating others to make the most powerful explosive in the world ... and that's not something China would want to proliferate.

Not only that but China's economy right now is in recession. GDP has been falling from months, so people are saving instead of spending on leisure. Just like Barbie, it won't make much.

On Maoyan it has 135k people wanting to see it. It opens on 30th August. The Meg 2 - a film much more up China's alley - opens on 4th August and has 640k people wanting to see it. So these numbers aren't too bad for Oppenheimer in that context, although at the box office/economic peaks the "people wanting to see numbers" on Maoyan were way higher, in the 800k to 2 million range for big movies, so I don't see Oppenheimer doing enough in China to affect its worldwide total much.

But wouldn't they want to see a movie about how badly Japan got blown up in WW2?

Barbie’ Tops $900M WW, ‘Oppenheimer’ Nears $500M
she heads into the third weekend of release, Warner Bros’ Barbie has hit two new milestones, crossing both $500M at the international box office and the nine-century mark worldwide. The Greta Gerwig-directed phenomenon added $16.8M from 69 offshore markets on Thursday, bringing the overseas total to $509.7M through yesterday. Globally, the doll is standing tall with $916.1M as she looks to rollerblade past $1B this weekend.

The Top 5 markets to date for the Margot Robbie-starrer are the UK ($77.3M), Mexico ($45.8M), Brazil ($36.5M), Australia ($34.3M) and China ($29.5M).

Christopher Nolan’s epic Oppenheimer is, meanwhile, on its way across the $500M mark globally with $478.8M through Thursday. Yesterday’s offshore gross was $10.6M, lifting the international box office cume to $278.9M.

In the UK, the through-Thursday total on the Universal film is $43.1M, in line with Dunkirk. Germany is next best with a running cume of $23M, performing 15% above The Dark Knight Rises and surpassing the lifetime of The Dark Knight, having already overtaken the lifetimes of Dunkirk, Interstellar and Tenet. France has a market cume to date of $21M, which is 11% above The Dark Knight Rises and has surpassed the full run of The Dark Knight. Australia is now at $15.3M, 58% above Dunkirk, having surpassed the lifetimes of Interstellar and Tenet. India has a running total of $14.7M, having already surpassed the lifetimes of all Nolan comps. The title is the 2nd biggest Hollywood movie of the year behind Fast X in that market.

Other notable cumes include Mexico at $12.6M; Spain with $12.1M andperforming above The Dark Knight Rises (+35%), having passed the lifetimes of Dunkirk, Interstellar and Tenet; Saudi Arabia at $9.3M which is bigger than the lifetime of all Nolan comps; and Netherlands where Oppenheimer has become Nolan’s biggest film ever, with $9.2M so far.