Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros., and the Struggle for the Soul of Movies
The upcoming face-off between ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Barbie’ points to a conflict between two radically opposed visions of movies. On the one side: Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. On the other: Christopher Nolan.
From the moment Warner Bros. announced Barbie would arrive in theaters on July 21, 2023, the same day previously announced as Oppenheimer’s release date, the two films have been pitted against one another. But the face-off is ultimately a distraction from larger issues within the film industry, even if it involves some of the same players. In the battle between Barbie and Oppenheimer, the only rational response is to hope for both films to be (a) good and (b) successful. Both are, from all appearances, ambitious and unusual projects from major directors. (Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is rooted in IP but can’t be easily mistaken for the fashion-doll equivalent of The Super Mario Bros. Movie or a Transformers sequel.) Both, in other words, are the sorts of films treated as must-sees by those who consider themselves more than casual moviegoers, as suggested by AMC’s report that it’s already sold 20,000 tickets to those planning to take them in as a double feature and by the appearance of “Barbenheimer” T-shirts. For those who care about movies, the only real choice this coming weekend is “all of the above”; it doesn’t matter which ends up winning the weekend box office.
The matchup does point to another underlying conflict, however, between two radically opposed visions of movies, their place in culture, and their future at large. On one side: Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. On the other: Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan, who, with each new revelation made about the man now in charge of Warner Bros., is starting to look like the anti-Zaslav. And though there’s ultimately a clear hero and obvious villain, the situation they’re both involved in isn’t a simple one.
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
Like a lot of the predicaments that the world now finds itself in, it features the COVID-19 pandemic in a major supporting role. On December 3, 2020, Warner Bros. announced that its 2021 films—all 17 of them, including Dune and the third Matrix sequel—would premiere simultaneously in theaters and on the service then known as HBO Max. It was an unexpected development, to say the least. Theatrical exhibition had been devastated by the pandemic, and the FDA would not authorize the first coronavirus vaccines for another week. But this was a major studio putting its bets on streaming rather than theaters for (at least) the next year, a move most speculated had as much to do with HBO Max’s flagging subscription numbers as a concern for public health and safety.
Four days after the announcement, Nolan weighed in, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.” By Nolan’s logic, this wasn’t just about art, but about business. “Their decision makes no economic sense,” he added, “and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.” It was an issue disturbing enough for Nolan to end his relationship with Warner Bros., a collaboration that dated back to his 2002 remake of Insomnia, his first film for a major studio. In September 2021, news broke that Nolan’s next film, a biopic of atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, would be for Universal.
In some respects, Nolan was then an imperfect messenger for the primacy of the theatrical experience. In the year leading up to Warner Bros.’ decision, the release of Nolan’s 2020 film, Tenet, became a kind of beacon of hope, signaling the moment when movie theaters would resume business as usual. Its U.S. release date kept shifting, moving from July 17 to July 31 before finally opening in some cities on September 3. For many, it seemed too soon (and restrictions prevented the film from opening in New York and elsewhere). Warner Bros.—presumably with Nolan’s approval, if not at his insistence—refused to make the film available digitally for critics, requiring them to attend screenings. Some simply balked. It seemed like an instance in which Nolan favored theatrical evangelism at the expense of public safety.
Still, the merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery in April 2022 into the Brundlefly-like Warner Bros. Discovery seemed to confirm the wisdom of Nolan’s decision to bolt. With that merger came Zaslav’s ascent to CEO of the new company, a role he’d previously played at Discovery.
A catalog of Zaslav’s greatest hits since taking control of Warner Bros. Discovery would be an article unto itself. In fact, GQ had a pretty good article written by Jason Bailey earlier this month that detailed just that—you might have heard about it because the piece was edited to soften its criticisms at the request of a Zaslav spokesman, and then the story was pulled entirely when Bailey asked for his byline to be removed. (The original still exists in archived form.) Some highlights include the shelving of a nearly completed Batgirl movie, which allowed the studio to use it as a tax write-off; the removal of original series made for HBO and other networks, including the once-mighty Westworld, also seemingly for tax purposes; and the sell-off of over half of Warner Bros.’ film and TV music assets.
Nothing is as concerning, or as revealing of Zaslav’s vision of the movies, however, as the gutting of Turner Classic Movies, the beloved cable destination for classic film. Thoughtfully programmed to provide context for our cinematic past, TCM has been essential to cinephiles since 1994—increasingly so since the shuttering of video stores and other channels’ retreats from airing classic films. (It’s now a distant memory that AMC used to be TCM’s rival.) It was, from all evidence, a gutting performed less out of necessity than out of an attempt to save money, any money, no matter what was lost in the process. TCM was, by all reports, a profitable operation, if not one destined to pad out the coffers of Warner Bros. Discovery to Uncle Scrooge–like dimensions. An intervention by Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese led Zaslav to restate his commitment to TCM and his love of classic film—which he also expressed via an unconvincing and glib Maureen Dowd column—but TCM remains a decimated operation with an unsure future in the climate Zaslav has created.
Here’s a thought exercise: Would Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery have indulged Nolan’s pet project of a few years back: releasing an “unrestored” version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, created by using original negatives owned by Warner Bros.? The release earned a lot of cinephile attention, and viewers who turned out for its art-house run in 2018—the same year the Discovery-owned TLC debuted the first episode of Dr. Pimple Popper—saw a gorgeous version of one of the greatest movies ever made. But so what? Why indulge in that sort of small-potatoes exercise?
Another project is even more telling of how Nolan’s vision contrasts with Zaslav’s. In 2015, Nolan released the short documentary Quay and oversaw the release of The Quay Brothers in 35mm, projects dedicated to the work of stop-motion animators Stephen and Timothy Quay. The Quays’ work, largely unknown outside of cinephile circles, is exacting, laborious, and deeply rooted in the old ways of making movies. It makes perfect sense as a Nolan inspiration.
In some ways, it’s not fair to compare a CEO—who, by definition, has to be in charge of a sprawling operation—to a single filmmaker. But it’s possible that because of his dedication to the past, Nolan is better equipped for the future. Since the disastrous report in April 2022 that Netflix had lost 200,000 subscribers, sending its stock plummeting by more than 35 percent, there’s been a nagging sense that something isn’t right with the streaming model—that the vision of theatrical releases as advertisements for film’s real home on competing streaming services may be misplaced, and that at some point, the bill would come due on the spending sprees used to set up streaming services for future profits. It makes sense that so many issues involved in the simultaneous WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes can be explained by a combination of greed and fear.
Nolan’s approach, by contrast, puts the emphasis on theatrical exhibition and on movies made to be seen by crowds on the biggest possible screens. Most films aren’t released in eight different formats or accompanied by format viewing guides. Movies are an event, in other words. Home viewing is essentially the film’s afterlife. It’s, in many respects, the way things used to be and nothing like the world preferred by Zaslav and others in the streaming business.
That might be why the Barbie (a Warner Bros. film) vs. Oppenheimer showdown feels a little personal. In many cities, their press screenings have been, at least initially, scheduled on the same night, forcing critics to cover one or the other. At the same time, Warner Bros. has been vocal about wanting to coax Nolan back to the studio, where he’d fit right into a professed plan to emphasize theatrical screenings and risky projects, as expressed by Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, co-CEOs of the division now known as Warner Bros. Film Group. And there’s no reason to think that De Luca and Abdy aren’t serious. They’re real film people with track records to prove it, including a recent stint together at MGM that included auteur projects like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza and Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci.
But they also work for David Zaslav, whose record has so far been defined by the trading of artistic achievement and lasting prestige for immediate profits. De Luca and Abdy’s definition of success might not be the same as their boss’s, and it’s hard to imagine that Nolan wouldn’t be wary about a return to the fold no matter what promises are made. Whatever the case, the film industry status quo that Zaslav has come to symbolize seems unsustainable—and, with the ongoing strikes, it’s not being sustained at all—and Nolan’s adherence to tradition suggests movies can still be made, distributed, and watched the way they were before the disruptions of the last decade. Whether he’ll be a model for others to follow or one of the last of his kind remains the great, unanswered question.
Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: Uproxx, The Dissolve, and The A.V. Club.