Comcast’s Philly executives were eyeing Christopher Nolan for years. Now, they might hit Oscar gold with Oppenheimer.

Long before Christopher Nolan envisioned a WWII biopic about the creator of the atomic bomb, and years before Comcast had come to own a major movie studio, CEO Brian Roberts had an eye on the filmmaker.

Last year, they made history. Oppenheimer, Nolan’s first film with Comcast-owned Universal Pictures, became the highest-grossing biopic of all time. And it will be competing for 13 Academy Awards — more nominations than any other movie has this year — at the awards ceremony Sunday night.

It was Universal studio chief Donna Langley, since elevated to chief content officer of NBCUniversal, who made the deal with the director.

“It is a proud moment for the entire company,” Roberts said in an interview Friday. “It would be just an amazing experience for Donna and her team to win best picture.”

When Langley called Roberts to tell him she’d secured a handshake deal for Universal to make a “top-secret” Nolan project, Roberts asked if he could call the filmmaker directly.

On that call, Roberts told Nolan that he and his father, Comcast founder Ralph Roberts, went to the Sundance Film Festival in 2001 for the first time. The first movie they saw there was Nolan’s Memento, a psychological thriller in reverse chronology that eventually became a cult classic.

After the film, Roberts said, “out came this young director who walked on stage and did a 45-minute Q&A and we sat there mesmerized.”

Nolan’s jump to Comcast-owned Universal in 2021 marked a major pivot. The director had been making movies with Warner Brothers for two decades, but they weren’t seeing eye-to-eye on how movies should be released as COVID-19 changed some viewers’ habits.

“We never stopped believing that people want to experience great films in theaters,” Comcast president Mike Cavanagh said on an earnings call last fall. “And that conviction enabled us to attract new partners like Chris Nolan, who made a masterpiece in Oppenheimer.”

Nolan reportedly discussed the movie with several different studios, as well as Apple. He ultimately went with Universal, after Langley promised a robust theatrical marketing budget.

“It was a very deliberate attempt to recruit him to Universal,” Roberts said. When he called Nolan the day the film director decided to work with Comcast, it was the first time they had spoken. Roberts told the director on the spot that the Oppenheimer film would be one of the projects NBCUniversal “supercharged” with promotions across its many assets.

Nolan reminisced about the call in a recent speech at Sundance’s opening night gala. He and Emma Thomas — the movie’s producer who also happens to be Nolan’s wife — worried as they waited for Roberts to join the line, thinking it might be bad news.

When Roberts started talking about Memento’s Sundance showing in 2001, Nolan said he and his wife realized “we’re probably going to be OK.”

“He liked the film, as did his dad.”