Christopher Nolan refuses to say how he really feels about “Barbenheimer”

The movie event of the summer (maybe of all-time???) is “Barbenheimer,” the double-feature of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which has been a months-long fan-generated marketing scheme built around the fact that both movies come out on the same day—July 21—and appear to be complete opposites in every possible respect. AMC says 20,000 people have supposedly bought tickets for both movies, with Gerwig and Barbie star Margot Robbie even joining the fun by posing with tickets in front of an Oppenheimer poster. But don’t count on Nolan to do the same… or even to comment on the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, because he doesn’t seem particularly interested in any of it.

Speaking with Insider, Nolan—perhaps pointedly—noted that he has not seen Barbie yet (though it just premiered earlier this week), but when the interviewer suggested the existence of a conspiracy theory that Warner Bros. purposefully decided to release Barbie on the same day as Oppenheimer, the filmmaker simply declined, “with a chuckle,” to answer the question. So he won’t engage with it, but it does seem like a fairly compelling theory, even if it does ascribe a particularly surprising amount of vindictiveness to whoever made the ultimate decision on Barbie’s release date.

As Nolan Heads will recall, the director worked with Warner Bros. on almost all of his previous films, having what must’ve been pretty close to a “blank check” deal at the studio. But his feelings toward Warner Bros. soured dramatically over the pandemic when it bungled the release of Tenet and then released all of its 2021 movies on what was then called HBO Max, a move that greatly offended Nolan even though it didn’t directly impact him. He took Oppenheimer to Universal in 2021, and now—surprise surprise—it’s opening on the very same weekend as one of Warner’s big summer movies.

There were rumors back in April that Oppenheimer would flinch and move from its July 21 release, though they were proven false, and the Insider piece says that unnamed sources “familiar with matter” claimed that Nolan was “upset” with Warner Bros. over the Barbie release. Supposedly, some people in “the movie theater community” tried to get Warner Bros. to move Barbie, since they all apparently love Nolan (and, we assume, the money his movies bring in) but that didn’t happen.

But all Nolan will say about it is that people “who care about the theatrical experience” have “been longing for a crowded marketplace” like this, and so they’re “thrilled” about the idea of having two big movies going up against each other like this. He’s being very diplomatic, in other words.