Christopher Nolan just won the Academy Award for the massively successful Oppenheimer, but now all eyes are on the critically acclaimed director’s next project — and per a new report, that next project might just be a remake of a television series. According to Variety, Nolan’s next project could be a remake of the 1960s television mystery thriller series The Prisoner.
The Prisoner was a British series created by Patrick McGoohan, who also starred as Number Six, an unnamed British intelligence officer who is abducted and imprisoned at a mysterious coastal village after he resigns his position. The series, which contained elements of science fiction, spy fiction, and psychological drama, ran for 17 episodes between September 1966 and 1968. Nolan was previously connected to a project based on the series back in 2009, but later dropped out of the project. That same year, AMC remade the series as a miniseries starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen, though it didn’t perform very well with critics.
Tucked into the report suggesting that Nolan could take on an adaptation of The Prisoner as his next project is also the suggestion that Warner Bros. and Universal are the two studios most likely for whatever Nolan’s next film is. Nolan has a long history with Warner Bros., but parted ways with the studio following its day-and-date release strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately going to Universal with Oppenheimer.
While it might be a little bit of time before we definitively know what Nolan’s next project will be, what we do know is that the success of Oppenheimer is leaving the filmmaker with a massive payday. After bonuses, Nolan is set to take home around $100 million for not just its box office success, but it’s awards season success as well. The filmmaker had provisions in place giving him additional compensation should the film win Best Director and Best Picture at the Academy Awards, which the film won both.
During a recent appearance on the Countdown to the BAFTAs podcast, Nolan talked about how the success of Oppenheimer could point to a “post-franchise” shift in Hollywood.
“Everybody has a tendency to talk down the movie business,” Nolan explained. “Really for the whole time I think I’ve been working in movies, I felt the sort of cultural establishment always predicting the demise of movie theaters. Now I get asked that question, you know, ‘What do I think about the health of the movie business?’ I don’t really know how to respond. We just released a three-hour, R-rated film about quantum physics and it made a billion dollars. Like what? Obviously, our view is that the audience is there and they’re excited to see something new.”
“The success of Oppenheimer certainly points to a sort of, post-IP landscape for movies … It’s kind of encouraging,” he continued. “It reminds the studios that there is an appetite for something people haven’t seen before or an approach to things that people haven’t seen before.”
“Something like Oppenheimer working gives other filmmakers a point of reference for how something can work in the marketplace that the studio can relate to,” he added.
