Christopher Nolan's Next Movie Has a Release Date. So WTF Is It?
It's no secret that Christopher Nolan doesn’t like to talk about his future projects. When a journalist from The Atlantic asked the Oppenheimer director what his next film would tackle last November, he flat-out told the interviewer, "[You're] wasting your last question." Nolan surely said this more playfully than it reads on paper. “It’s really about finding the story that I want to be engaged with in the years it takes to make a film,” he continued. Well, it seems like he’s found his story.
According to Universal, Nolan’s next film will arrive in cinemas on July 17, 2026. There’s no title or plot, but we do have a star. Matt Damon is “in talks” to lead the film, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It marks Damon's third collaboration with Nolan after Interstellar and Oppenheimer.
While little is known about what direction the film will head in, sources told THR, “the project is not a big screen take on 1960s British series The Prisoner, an endeavour Nolan contemplated in the 2000s.” So, if you happened to have your money on, “a big screen take on 1960s British series The Prisoner,” then I'm sorry to say that you’re out of luck. Aside from that, the world is Nolan’s oyster. So what is Nolan's thirteenth film about? We placed a few bets below.
Artificial Intelligence
If there’s anything Nolan loved to talk about on the press tour for Oppenheimer, it was the rise of AI. He mentioned that AI is the next “Oppenheimer” moment for humanity when he talked to NBC News. He waded into the AI debate in an interview with The Washington Post, and even told WIRED that he thought there were some potentially interesting “mythological underpinnings” to the conversation around AI.
“If we endorse the view that AI is all-powerful, we are endorsing the view that it can alleviate people of responsibility for their actions—militarily, socioeconomically, whatever,” he said. “The biggest danger of AI is that we attribute these godlike characteristics to it and therefore let ourselves off the hook… but throughout history there's this tendency of human beings to create false idols, to mold something in our own image and then say we've got godlike powers because we did that.”
Jason Bourne 6
Sure, this idea is what I personally want to see, but Bourne 6 is definitely on the table more than you might think. For starters, Matt Damon has already expressed interest in returning to the role. During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this year, he said that if Bourne 6 didn't happen with him, "At a certain point somebody is going to need to take it over. I’m not getting any younger."
Hollywood has already attempted to create a new Jason Bourne twice now. There was 2012's The Bourne Legacy with Jeremy Renner, and then a spinoff TV series titled Treadstone in 2019. It starred Jeremy Irvine and lasted just one season. Universal, it's time to call the real Jason Bourne back in.
A Howard Hughes Biopic
When Nolan talked to Variety last November, he revealed that he had a semi-completed script for a Howard Hughes biopic back in the early 2000s. He even expected to cast Jim Carrey. But after Martin Scorsese released The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2007, Nolan was no longer interested in telling another version of the same story. While filming Inception, Nolan even told DiCaprio that he’s still never seen The Aviator. “It was very emotional to not get to make something I’d poured all that into,” he explained.
Nolan could also whip out an entirely original idea. Hell, he could make Inception 2, or even tell us that he’s become obsessed with something completely out of left field. During one of my Internet rabbit holes, I read that a couple of British generals stole George Washington’s mail during the American Revolution and replaced it with false information. Sounds like something Nolan could get into, no? Who knows!
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