Jonathan Nolan still wants to finish Westworld

Few moves were more shocking, in the David Zaslav-led Warner Bros. apocalypse of 2022, than removing Westworld from HBO after its cancelation. Yes, the show was complicated and confounding, and yes, viewership declined over the seasons. But it was a keystone series for HBO in the late 2010s, a sprawling, stylish sci-fi epic with some unforgettable performances. For the show to just be dropped after all that felt like a disservice to the series, and its lack of closure haunted the fans, the stars, and the creators alike. “Jonah and I have always had an ending in mind that we hope to reach. We have not quite reached it yet,” co-creator Lisa Joy said at the time of cancellation.

Her husband and co-creator Jonathan Nolan still has hopes of reaching it. “We’re completionists,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in a new interview. “It took me eight years and a change of director to get Interstellar made. We’d like to finish the story we started.”

Nolan is generous about getting dropped from HBO, pointing out that ad-supportive services like Roku and Tubi, where Westworld now lives, can reach a bigger audience anyway. And he knows, too, that in television, sometimes the journey gets cut short. “I’m so fucking proud of what we made. It was an extraordinary experience. I think it would be a mistake to look back and only feel regret [over how it ended],” he said. “But there’s still very much a desire to finish it.”

It’s unclear what “finishing” Westworld will look like, if it does come to pass. Getting any more money out of Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery to shoot another season or a movie seems an unlikely proposition. Nolan and Joy could shop a movie elsewhere or complete the story as a graphic novel, as THR suggested. (Star Evan Rachel Wood, for one, would like to get “the payoff at the end to see where it was all going.”) The one thing Nolan will not do is reign in the ambition of his twisty puzzle box storytelling. “You put everything you have into one movie or one season. If you get a chance to go again, then great,” he told THR of what he’s learned in his career. “If the ‘lesson’ was to ease back on the complexity or the weirdness of something, I don’t want to learn that lesson.”