Why did Christopher Nolan leave Warner Bros?
Between 2002 and 2020, Christopher Nolan was Warner Bros Pictures’ lucky charm. The phenomenally successful director rose through the ranks at the studio, beginning with the star-led crime thriller Insomnia before entering blockbuster territory with Batman Begins. Between 2006 and 2012, he made two more Batman pictures – The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises – as well as The Prestige and the mind-bending sci-fi spectacle Inception. More sci-fi followed with Interstellar before Nolan made the World War II epic Dunkirk in 2017.
These films established Nolan as one of the only marquee directing names left in a Hollywood landscape that has become enslaved by IP. After gaining public support and enormous box office returns with The Dark Knight Trilogy, Nolan transferred that interest to his more personal films, which all made the kind of money most studios can only dream of for original ideas. Thus, when Nolan set up Tenet, a sci-fi espionage thriller, as his ninth movie for the studio, observers sat back and waited for the inevitable success story. Unfortunately, world events would conspire to turn Tenet into Nolan’s first failure. Well, sort of.
When Warner initially scheduled Tenet for release on July 17th, 2020, no one at the studio could have predicted that a global pandemic would arise that, to date, has killed more than 7million people. As the world went into lockdown, cinemas everywhere were shuttered, and the very future of the movie business looked up in the air. For months, Nolan and Warner debated what to do about Tenet, with Nolan adamant that his big-budget tentpole should be the movie that re-opened cinemas. Ultimately, it was released at the end of August in 70 countries and September 3rd in the US.
Now, while Tenet made a very respectable $365.9million worldwide – an insane number considering people were afraid for their lives when venturing into any public place – it wasn’t considered a roaring success that single-handedly saved the theatrical movie business. This stung Nolan, but worse was to come in December 2020, when Warner announced it was sending its entire 2021 movie slate to its streaming service HBO Max.
An irate Nolan told Entertainment Weekly, “There’s such controversy around it because they didn’t tell anyone. In 2021, they’ve got some of the top filmmakers in the world, they’ve got some of the biggest stars in the world who worked for years, in some cases, on these projects very close to their hearts that are meant to be big-screen experiences. They’re meant to be out there for the widest possible audiences, and now they’re being used as a loss leader for the streaming service – for the fledgeling streaming service – without any consultation.”
Amazingly, Nolan even accused Warner of a “bait and switch” and told The Hollywood Reporter, “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.” It was a stunningly honest and pointed attack on the studio he’d happily worked with for nearly 20 years, proving how much Warner’s decision-making had soured him on their working relationship. Therefore, when it was announced in September 2021 that Nolan would take his next feature – the future Oscar-darling Oppenheimer – to Universal Pictures, few were surprised.
Will Chistopher Nolan ever go back to Warner Bros?
Oppenheimer, of course, proved to be Nolan’s most significant success and a massive boon to Universal. The three-hour R-rated biopic of the man who created the atomic bomb made nearly a billion dollars at the box office and swept the Oscars, winning ‘Best Picture’ and landing Nolan his first ‘Best Director’ trophy. Universal reportedly gave the filmmaker carte blanch to do whatever he wanted, and he repaid them with a genuine cultural moment. Once again, then, it wasn’t surprising when Nolan announced that his next movie, an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, would be made at Universal, too.
The question of whether Nolan will ever go back to Warner Bros is a tough one, though. At the moment, he seems very happy at Universal. Intriguingly, Warner reportedly tried to tempt him back to the studio with a seven-figure cheque that reimbursed fees he agreed to wave in 2020 to ensure a theatrical release for Tenet, but even that didn’t move him to return to the fold.
As Stephen Galloway of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts told Variety, Nolan might be a rich man, but he’s not actually motivated by money. Instead, he believes Nolan thinks more along the lines of, “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?” Considering he has all those things with Universal, it’s hard to imagine Nolan coming back to Warner anytime soon – although perhaps the old adage “Never say never” can’t be discounted.
