Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was not only one of the biggest movies that came out in 2023 but it was also one of the movies that managed to sweep the most during the award season. Oppenheimer won the Best Picture award at the 96th Academy Awards held on March 10th, 2024 along with Nolan winning the Best Director award.
Oppenheimer starring Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer became the third highest-grossing movie of 2023. One of the most significant things about Oppenheimer is the alternative scenes between colored and black and white to convey the story from both subjective and objective perspectives. Now, fans are curious about Nolan’s next big project and according to reports, it’s the one he left behind in 2009.
Christopher Nolan to revisit 2009’s mystery-thriller The Prisoner as his next project?
According to reports by Variety, after a successful award season, the audience is curious about Christopher Nolan’s next project. The reports suggest that it could be his 2009’s mystery-thriller The Prisoner which was based on a 1960s TV series of the same name created by Patrick McGoohan.
The director along with Blade Runner fame David Webb Peoples and his wife Janet were working on the script of the movie in 2006. Nolan was very pleased with how the script was turning out to be before a mini-series re-imagining of The Prisoner was released. Upon its release the show received mixed reactions from the audience as well as the critics and Nolan thought that it was time for him to move on from that story.
During a question & answer session with IGN Film Force back in 2006 (via Rotten Tomatoes), the director at the time said about the movie,
“The Prisoner is something I’ve been interested in for quite a long time and I think I’ve figured out the take on how we’d approach it. The relevance of it today. David and Janet Peoples are terrific, who you know wrote Blade Runner and Tweleve Monkeys.”
The filmmaker dwelled upon the writers stating,
“They’re working on the script right now. I wouldn’t want to speak for them. I’m very excited to see what they’ve come up with.”
It was later reported that the filmmaker had decided to depart from the project noting that he was planning to work on his third Batman movie. Producer Barry Mendel at the time shared that the filmmaker has indeed departed from the project but they have the first draft of the script by David and Janet and they are working on that.
The producer noted (via Contact Music), at the time that the screenplay was a re-imagination of the series, adding that if people think about The Avengers, it wasn’t a commercial success but it was very much in the spirit of the original show.
Christopher Nolan refuses to watch Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator
In an interview with Variety, a filmmaker who is celebrating the successful wins of his movie Oppenheimer at the Academy Awards shared that he cannot watch Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
The filmmaker shared that before The Aviator premiered in 2004, he was working on a movie based on the life of Howard Hughes with Jim Carrey in consideration. By the time he completed his draft of the script, Scorsese’s movie was already in production and he thought there was no point in developing another story based on the same character.
The fact that he was not established at the time, as he is now, it was challenging for him to get his project approved. Nolan admits that he never felt comfortable with watching Scorsese’s The Aviator. Nolan and Scorsese are considered as one of the biggest and finest filmmakers and it was hard for Nolan at the time to let go of something into which he poured his heart.
In an interview with the New York Times, he shared,
“The film never got made because I wrote it right as Scorsese was making his own film. That satisfaction gave me a lot of insight on how to distill a person’s life and how to view a person’s life in a thematic way so that the film is more than the sum of its parts. So in some way, the script took me a few months, but it was really a culmination of 20 years of thinking.”
Leonardo DiCaprio and Christopher Nolan worked together in Inception and the director said he confessed to the actor about why he had never seen his movie.
Oppenheimer is available to stream on Peacock.
