It all started with Insomnia in 2002, that was the point when Nolan started to take the sleep away from the cinema lovers. Inception, Dunkirk, and Interstellar have been big milestones of the partnership and Tenet was the final nail. And how can we forget the phenomenal Batman trilogy? This 20-year-long partnership broke when Nolan went to Universal for his epic Oppenheimer.
WB has been a leading player in movies and entertainment in general but slowly losing its glory. So it’s understandable that they wanna go back to their glory days of filmmaking and what do they need for that? Probably the Nolan factor, at least they are going in that direction.
Michael De Luca, the co-chairperson and CEO of Warner Bros, recently said, “We’re hoping to get Nolan back, I think there’s a world.”
A couple of sources say that Nolan received a 7-figure royalty check which was tied to his 2020 film Tenet. A source says De Luca, Abdy, and Zaslav all agreed he was owed the bonus in good faith. It is reported that the studio is trying to repair the broken relationship and trying to make the filmmakers feel valued.
In the past, WB had the tendency to see themselves as more powerful than the filmmakers themselves. They devalued geniuses like Snyder and Nolan and that is now prominent in the numbers.
Oppenheimer will be released on the 21st of July and we will see how it works out between Universal and Nolan but it looks promising indeed.
