While one might assume there’s bad blood between Warner Bros execs and Christopher Nolan following the auteur’s much-publicized exit from the studio, the new creative team at the studio says that just isn’t so. According to a new piece in Variety, studio bosses Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy want Nolan back – pronto. “We’re hoping to get Nolan back…I think there’s a world,” said De Luca.
Nolan, a few years ago, infamously slammed WB for sending their theatrical releases day and date to Max (then called HBO Max), saying previously, “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 took his latest project, Oppenheimer, to Universal Pictures, and many figured the decision to go up against WB’s Barbie was a kind of mutual middle finger between the two titans. Not so, says the studio, with him doing Oppenheimer post-production on the WB lot and recently getting a rich royalty check for Tenet which, despite coming out at the worst point of the pandemic, still grossed over $365 million worldwide.
Elsewhere in the piece, creatives such as Todd Phillips, who made all of his films since The Hangover for the studio, say the studio is the best place for filmmakers. Everyone criticizes the move to go day-and-date on Max, but the policy has been rolled back under the new heads of the studio, with Phillips stating, “…in recent years, the studio kind of lost its way. To me, Mike and Pam are a sign to everyone that Warner Bros. is back on track. They have a deep respect for what we do.”
2023 is proving to be a banner year for the studio, with The Flash, Blue Beetle, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, the musical version of The Color Purple, Barbie and Dune: Part 2 all set to hit theatres by the year’s end.