Warner Bros. Wants to Get Christopher Nolan Back After Tenet Debacle

Warner Bros. wants to make amends with Christopher Nolan following their breakup in 2021. In an interview with Variety, Warner Bros. Film Group co-CEO Michael De Luca said, “We’re hoping to get Nolan back. I think there’s a world.”

Variety also reports that Warner Bros. sent Nolan a seven-figure royalty check sometime in the past eight months tied to his work on 2020’s Tenet. Apparently “no strings were attached”, but Warner Bros. is motivated to repair its relationship with the director.

Nolan and Warner Bros.’ public breakup happened across 2020 and 2021. It started when Nolan responded to Warner Bros.’ decision to move its entire 2021 film slate to HBO Max. The director clearly wasn’t happy with the choice, saying, “some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.”

Following this, Nolan chose Universal to help distribute Oppenheimer, his next film that’s due to hit theaters in July. Universal was reportedly the only studio able to meet Nolan’s strict demands, including a $100 million budget, “total creative control, 20 percent of first-dollar gross, and a blackout period from which the studio wherein the company would not release another movie three weeks before or three weeks after his release.”

Nolan and Universal’s partnership on Oppenheimer marks the end of the director’s exclusive dealings with Warner Bros. that date back to 2002’s Insomnia. Two decades of Nolan and Warner Bros. movies included The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and more.

We’ll have to wait and see where Nolan goes for his next film following Oppenheimer. The upcoming movie is Nolan’s first R-rated movie since 2002, and it’s also set to be the longest movie of his career. Nolan is also touting that the movie recreates the devastation of the first atomic bomb without using CGI. 

For more, check out our ranking of every Christopher Nolan movie.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN covering video game and entertainment news. He has over seven years of experience in the gaming industry with bylines at IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine, and Lifewire. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.