Christopher Nolan's next movie has already caused a big studio battle

The last time we all saw Christopher Nolan, he was absolutely at the peak of his career. After decades of near-misses, he finally ascended the Oscars summit thanks to Oppenheimer, winning Best Picture and Best Director for his atomic bomb biopic.

Inevitably, this raised a very big question. Where do you go from there? Everyone in Hollywood wants to be in the Christopher Nolan business. He has long been established as one of the few directors around today who can be considered a name brand in their own right — along with Spielberg, Tarantino, and Scorsese — and he now has the cachet of awards season domination behind him.

That means his next film was a hot property in the Hollywood marketplace. We now know that the next Nolan outing — which is, naturally, shrouded in typically Nolanesque mystery right now but looks set to star Matt Damon and Tom Holland — will see the director reteam with Oppenheimer studio Universal.

Things haven't always been this way. Until the pandemic era, Nolan had a fruitful and long-running collaboration going with Warner Bros. Nolan worked with the studio for around 20 years, running from his 2002 thriller Insomnia through the likes of Inception, Interstellar, and his critically acclaimed trilogy of Batman movies.

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But that relationship soured in 2020. As the pandemic continued to leave multiplexes in an uncertain place, Warner Bros announced that it would pioneer an unusual release strategy in 2021. All of its films, including blockbusters like Dune and The Suicide Squad, would get a day-and-date release on HBO Max (now known as Max) along with their cinema run.

In a typically passionate statement, Nolan said: "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."

Nolan decided he would take his next movie elsewhere, striking a tremendous deal with Universal that would see them distribute Oppenheimer. The director issued a list of hefty demands and saw them met by the studio, including a $100m (£77m) budget, a traditional theatrical window, and a three-week period either side of his release date in which Universal could not put out another movie.

Given the fact Oppenheimer went on to make $977m (£751m) worldwide — chalk up an assist to Warner Bros and their decision to release Barbie on the same weekend — on the way to winning seven Oscars, it now looks like a very smart call by Universal to give Nolan everything he wanted.

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Nolan's attitude towards Warner Bros has softened in the years since the big split. In a November 2023 interview with Variety, he described the whole row as "water under the bridge". When asked if he'd ever work with the studio again, he said: "Oh yeah, absolutely. Pam and Mike and Zaslav, they’re trying to do some great things with that studio, which is encouraging to see."

But that softening hasn't been enough to prise Nolan away from Universal for his upcoming film. As Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, told Variety: "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."

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Nolan has proven that, if a studio gives him the creative environment and freedom he needs, he will stay loyal to them. And when you're a hit machine in the way that Nolan is, that loyalty can be very fruitful for studios. Expect this battle to play out again and again in the years to come.

Oppenheimer is streaming now on Sky Cinema and NOW in the UK.