In 2020, the release of Christopher Nolan’s $200 million “Tenet” was in jeopardy, facing an indefinite delay as the COVID pandemic raged, leaving theaters shuttered. Over that summer, the director, a champion of the big-screen experience, wanted his espionage thriller to be the first major tentpole to debut in reopened cinemas. Former Warner Bros. Entertainment chief Ann Sarnoff and the studio’s motion picture chairman, Toby Emmerich, agreed to move forward with a theatrical release so long as Nolan forwent certain fees.
Following WarnerMedia’s 2022 merger with Discovery and ensuing regime change, newly installed motion picture group chiefs Michael DeLuca and Pamela Abdy were eager to see Nolan return to the studio; he had defected to Universal nine months before their arrival to make “Oppenheimer.” Nolan had a long history with the studio dating back to 2002’s “Insomnia.” As a goodwill gesture, Warner Bros. wrote him a seven-figure check, returning the “Tenet” fees he waived.
Alas, that gesture failed to bring Nolan back. For a man who continues to live in the same modest house in the Hollywood Hills and was known to drive a 20-year-old Honda, money isn’t important, and a few extra million didn’t move the needle. Instead, the Oscar winner and his producing partner and wife, Emma Thomas, opted to take his next project, which stars Matt Damon, to Universal and its formidable leader, Donna Langley.
“What matters [to Nolan] is are you going to release this right? Are you going to have the correct marketing strategy? Are you going to get the Imax screens? Are you going to leave me alone to make the movie I want to make? All these things that he knows he got with Universal [on ‘Oppenheimer’],” says Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. “Why would he not go to Universal?”
Still, Warners’ overture underscores Nolan’s unique status in Hollywood, which has struggled to cultivate the next generation of auteurs who win Oscars and fill multiplexes. In fact, Nolan is part of a dying breed of directors with name recognition. That small pool includes Quentin Tarantino and James Cameron. Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese held similar perches but have seen diminishing box office returns even as their production budgets hold steady. (Spielberg’s $100 million “West Side Story” reboot took in $76 million worldwide toward the end of COVID, while Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” cost $215 million but earned $159 million worldwide last year.) Pickings are slim with the new wave of filmmakers. Greta Gerwig and Ryan Coogler have distinct styles and boast megahits with “Barbie” ($1.45 billion) and “Black Panther” ($1.35 billion). Yet both of those films were based on known intellectual properties.
What Nolan pulled off with “Oppenheimer” is miraculous. The best picture winner earned nearly a billion dollars — $976 million, to be exact — despite its R rating, three-hour run time and focus on a historical figure who is “the least likely subject to make money in the history of the entertainment business,” Galloway notes. When it comes to Nolan, his name is the brand.
“Christopher Nolan is an IP unto himself,” says box office analyst Jeff Bock. “Only a handful of directors are well known to the general public, and he is currently at the top of that list.”
What Nolan’s film will be remains a mystery. It won’t be “The Prisoner,” a project that has a long history at Universal and once was developed as a vehicle for the director. Sources say Nolan’s latest isn’t another sci-fi epic; some speculate that it may be in the espionage genre. That’s not a surprise given that Nolan flirted with making a Bond film at one point. However, that franchise has been in limbo since Daniel Craig retired as 007 with 2021’s “No Time to Die.” Plus, Nolan is a final-cut director, and Bond gatekeeper Barbara Broccoli is loath to grant any filmmaker that control.
But Nolan isn’t just any director. In addition to “Oppenheimer,” two of his films crossed the $1 billion mark: “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises.”
Says Galloway: “This isn’t some hack who happens to have delivered ‘Look Who’s Talking No. 38’ or ‘Sharknado.’ This is Christopher Nolan.”