Warner Bros. has announced that an 'Untitled Christopher Nolan Film' will join their 2017 slate of films with a July 21st release date. The studio felt that the news of Christopher Nolan directing a new feature film would be juicy enough on its own, so they have declined to provide any further information as to the feature's genre, title, cast, or even a logline. The good news is that, for the moment, Nolan could conceivably be directing almost anything you want him to, and until we hear otherwise, I'd like to know what topics his fans would like him to tackle next.
His most recent film, Interstellar, the Oscar-winning space odyssey that banked north of $675 million at the global box office, opened less than a year ago, so it's not as if the guy is coming out of retirement. Nolan even managed to direct a documentary short titled Quay, which explores the stop-motion work and studio of filmmakers Stephen and Timothy Quay. However, the 2017 film lands him square in the center of Warner Bros. batch of superhero films, falling between Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman on June 23rd, and Zack Snyder's Justice League Part One on November 17th. (It should also be noted that Warner Bros. Ninjago and Andy Serkis' Jungle Book: Origins also occupy that space between, so the studio has quite the crowded schedule at the moment.) So ... could Nolan be taking over for Ben Affleck as the director of the standalone Batman movie?
Keep in mind, this would probably mean there could be a significant rearranging of schedules if Warner Bros. was to somehow force a new Batman movie into existence between Wonder Woman and Justice League Part One, but the scheduled release date is still almost two years away. We learned back in July that Affleck was co-writing a standalone Batman film with Geoff Johns, and would be directing himself in that picture after completing his work on Live by Night. (Keeping tabs on that Dennis Lehane adaptation, it still does not have a locked-down release date scheduled, except to say that it's sometime in 2017.) More recently, we got word of a rumor that the studio brass was so impressed with Affleck's Batman that they have decided to pivot their entire cinematic superhero universe around his version of the Caped Crusader. This rumor has yet to be confirmed by WB, but perhaps it's because they were waiting to schedule a director to take some pressure off of Affleck's cape-bearing shoulders?
It feels a bit rushed to me, to have Nolan swoop in and direct another Bats picture, though the guy certainly knows his way around the Batcave considering he spent an entire film trilogy in there. Depending on if WB decides to shuffle their release schedule again or not, Nolan's currently untitled film would open the same weekend as Pitch Perfect 3, Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and an untitled Fox/DreamWorks Animation/Blue Sky feature. It would also open a week after Fox's War of the Planet of the Apes and one week before Columbia's Spider-Man reboot. Expect lots of things to do the release date shuffle.
What do you think Nolan's next film will be? Let us know in the comments below!
