Christopher Nolan really is assembling a top-notch cast for his next project, with Robert Pattinson the latest A-lister to join the ensemble.
Pattinson, who worked with Nolan on the highly-divisive 2020 sci-fi thriller Tenet, joins Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong’o and Zendaya. Nolan wrote the script and is directing the project, which has set a release date of July 17, 2026.
Though plot and character details remain under wraps, it's believed that Damon, Holland, Hathaway and now Pattinson make up the core leads of the feature, with Nyong’o and Zendaya in supporting roles.
As for the premise, we have heard numerous rumors and theories, from a futuristic action thriller inspired by '80s helicopter flick Blue Thunder, to a period vampire thriller - though THR notes that "insiders maintain that nothing has come close to nailing Nolan’s real idea."
With a few notable exceptions (Oppenheimer, Memento, Dunkirk), Nolan does tend to favor sci-fi based fare, but he did recently express interest in putting his stamp on the horror genre during a conversation with the British Film Institute (via THR).
“I think horror films are very interesting because they depend on very cinematic devices,” he said. “It’s really about [provoking] a visceral response to things. So at some point, I’d love to make a horror film. But I think a really good horror film requires a really exceptional idea — and those are few and far between. So I haven’t found the story that lends itself to that. But I think it’s a very interesting genre from a cinematic point of view. It’s also one of the few genres where — the studios make a lot of these films — and they’re films that have a lot of bleakness, a lot of abstraction. They have a lot qualities that Hollywood is generally very resistant to putting into films, but that’s a genre where it’s allowable.”
Nolan's films do tend to be quite dark, and he has incorporated horror elements in a few of his previous movies, including Batman Begins, The Prestige, and even Oppenheimer.
“Certainly Oppenheimer has elements of horror — which I definitely think is appropriate for the subject matter,” he added. "The middle of the film is very heavily based on the heist genre, and the third act of the film is the courtroom drama. And the reason I settled on those two genres for those sections is they are mainstream genres in which dialogue and people talking is inherently tense and interesting to an audience. That’s the fun thing with genre — you get to play with a lot of different areas whereas in different type of film you really wouldn’t be allowed to.”
There had been a lot of speculation about where Nolan's next feature would end up after the filmmaker expressed an openness to doing business with Warner Bros. again after his public falling out with the studio back in 2021. Nolan took issue with WB's decision to shift its entire 2021 film slate to HBO Max.
"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," the director said in a statement at the time.