Warner Bros. sent Christopher Nolan a 7-figure apology check… and still got ditched

Today in “That’s a very sweet gesture, now git on out of here” news: Christopher Nolan reportedly got sent a seven-figure check from his old pals at Warner Bros., clearly intended to help paper over some of the issues that led to Nolan taking his massively successful blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer across town to Universal a few years back… and then still got ditched when Nolan went ahead and decided to take his latest, as-yet-unnamed, movie to Universal, too.

As noted by Variety, all this drama reportedly stems from how very genuinely mad Nolan got at Warner, which had previously produced every one of his films since Insomnia, over their treatment of his 2020 sci-fi thriller Tenet. As you may recall, Nolan wanted the time travel movie to be the first big tentpole film to hit post-lockdown theaters, which it ultimately sort of was—but only after the studio got kind of chintzy with their prize director, insisting he waive certain usual fees in order to save a little cash. (To be fair to Warner Bros., the film did struggle in theaters, at least by Nolan’s usual standards, having lost both the Peloton instructor market with its convoluted plot, and also the “didn’t want to catch the infectious disease and die” crew.) Combined with the fact that the movie was put on to streaming the same day it hit theaters, the whole thing clearly left a bitter enough taste in Nolan’s mouth that, when he was shopping Oppenheimer around not long after, he ditched his old buddies and instead went to Universal. Who promised him exactly those things Christopher Nolan most wants for his movies: Big-ass movie theaters, and lots of them.

Realizing that they had somehow fumbled an extremely profitable relationship with one of the only genuine name-brand writer-directors on the planet, new studio heads at Warner Bros. apparently issued a goodwill gesture in 2022, sending Nolan a seven-figure sum paying him back for all those Tenet fees he’d been forced to waive. This was presumably received with a smile and a thank you and fuck-all else, because Nolan went ahead and announced a couple of weeks ago that he was sticking with Universal, which gives him big-ass movie theaters, and lots of them, for his movies, thank you very much.

Details about the new film are nil at this point, although Oppenheimer‘s Matt Damon is expected to star, and Warner Bros. execs are expected to have to just sit and watch the thing and fume.