Three months since its worldwide release, Christopher Nolan’s film about the creator of the atomic bomb, “Oppenheimer,” has yet to be seen in the only country where the weapons were dropped: Japan.

Neither Universal Studios, which rolled out the movie in the United States and other countries on July 21, nor Toho-Towa, Universal’s local distributor, have commented on its fate in the world’s third-largest cinema market; Toho-Towa tersely referred all queries regarding “Oppenheimer” to Universal and said it has yet to even receive any promotional materials from the company. Meanwhile, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations, which represents Japan’s hibakusha (victims of the World War II bombings), also declined to comment. “We haven’t seen the movie,” said a spokeswoman.

Hollywood movies are typically released without incident in Japan, though there are exceptions. “Unbroken,” a 2014 film depicting the real-life story of Louis Zamperini, a prisoner of war tortured by a sadistic Japanese camp commander, was stopped in its tracks by a campaign by the Japanese right-wing media. It was eventually screened at art house cinemas.

“Oppenheimer” opened in nearby South Korea in August and has been a financial success in China and other Asian markets.

The historical epic tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), the American scientist who directed the team that designed and built the bomb. The film has received mostly strong reviews — Tara Brady in The Irish Times called it “deeply flawed but brilliant” — but has also drawn criticism for relegating the many victims of Oppenheimer’s work to a mere footnote.

The U.S. military dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, less than a month after Oppenheimer oversaw the world’s first nuclear bomb test (also known as the Trinity test) in New Mexico, and the Japan bombings killed over 200,000 people, mostly civilians. However, this destruction is only alluded to and not shown in the movie.

Among the film’s critics is American director Spike Lee, who told The Washington Post this month that at three hours long, Nolan could have added “some more minutes about what happened to the Japanese people.”

“People got vaporized,” the director continued. “Many years later, people are radioactive. It’s not like he didn’t have power. He tells studios what to do. I would have loved to have the end of the film maybe show what it did, dropping those two nuclear bombs on Japan.”

Nolan, who calls Oppenheimer “the most important person who ever lived,” said he felt that departing from the scientist’s experience in the movie would have “betrayed the terms of the storytelling.”

“He learned about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the radio — the same as the rest of the world,” Nolan told NBC in July.

Commentators have speculated that Universal is worried about the Japanese domestic market’s reaction to the film, including the prospect of protests. “A biography of the maker of the atomic bomb that excludes any scene of the dropping of the bomb is highly likely to be flooded with criticism in Japan,” wrote Weekly Gendai magazine in August.

“Barbenheimer” — the social-media orchestrated box-office faceoff between “Oppenheimer” and Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster comedy “Barbie,” which herded many Americans to cinemas to see both movies as a double feature — probably did not help its prospects in Japan, speculates M.G. Sheftall, author of the forthcoming book, “Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses.”

The “Barbenheimer” phenomenon was “frivolous silliness involving content directly related to the darkest chapter of Japanese suffering, which made the Americans come off as glib and insensitive,” Sheftall says.

“Had (‘Oppenheimer’) gotten a Japan release, there would no doubt have been some criticism for the elision of Japanese suffering in the film, but nothing some corporate spin doctors could not have gotten around.”

Sheftall predicts the movie would have been successful in Japan and is “mystified” why it has not been released.

The incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, viewed by many as one of history’s great war crimes, has never been graphically depicted in a mainstream American film. James Cameron, who came closest with a haunting scene in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” has reportedly spent years trying to develop a film based on the story of double hibakusha Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who survived both atomic bombings.

There is also the matter of the timing of the film’s original release date. In a July 27 article, Japan Times contributor Mark Schilling wrote that “given that (summer) is a time of the year when many families (in Japan) make a rare outing to the local cineplex, the offerings tend to be family friendly.”

He goes on to write, “Opening the film when Japan is commemorating the atomic bombings of Hiroshima (Aug. 6) and Nagasaki (Aug. 9) would be in questionable taste. ... Japanese distributors tend to wait until the fall and winter months to release films by big-name directors with major awards potential.”

By this reasoning, “Oppenheimer” will have another chance in Japan, particularly if it picks up any prizes at the Academy Awards early next year. But as Japan-based writer Roger Pulvers points out, the longer the distributors wait, the more it loses in commercial terms.

The decision to shelve the movie is commercial, not political, he says. “There are some awfully dense people in movie companies,” Pulvers says.

Nao Kato assisted in the research of this article.