With The Odyssey now in theaters, the highly acclaimed writer-director Christopher Nolan has once again reached the end of a multi-year creative journey, resulting in a film being praised by both critics and audiences alike.
Though his time with The Odyssey’s reception is far from over (the film is pretty much a shoe-in for a great deal of attention come awards season), it does mean that it is time for speculation to begin as to what Nolan’s next project could be.
The filmmaker has stayed continuously busy with projects for the past two decades now and shows no real signs of slowing down. For the entirety of his feature film career, he has never gone more than three years between releases, which is both impressive and indicative of his apparent tireless work ethic.
Recently, Nolan has been getting a great deal of praise for his incorporation of horror genre elements into key sequences in The Odyssey, in unexpected and extremely effective ways.
This has led several members of the press, such as Empire, to ask Nolan if he is interested in making a full-blown horror movie, which he has responded extremely positively to, saying that he would “love to do a horror movie.”
This has resulted in a great deal of speculation that his The Odyssey follow-up could be a horror film, but is there any real legitimacy to such guesswork?
Sort of. The filmmaker has not only been open about his love for the genre as of late but has also dabbled in various elements of it throughout his career. Though he’s never made an all-out horror movie, you can certainly see shades of the genre dating as far back as his debut film, Following, all the way up to films like Oppenheimer and The Odyssey, both of which utilize visual language and audio design choices rooted in the genre.
Between this and his own comments about longing to do a proper horror film somewhere along the way, it seems like a pretty surefire bet that audiences will one day get to see a Christopher Nolan horror film.
However, will it be his next film? Probably not.
In speaking about his role in the film recently, Matt Damon wound up inadvertently detailing Nolan’s overarching sentiment regarding project selection at the moment. Damon said that despite insistence from fellow filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher to step back and make a small film, Nolan refuses to do so because he knows that at some point he’s “only going to be able to make small ones.”
In essence, Nolan is in his imperialist era and wants to make as many big-budget, hugely ambitious projects as he can right now because he knows these opportunities will not always be there on this scale.
To this end, a Nolan horror movie is likely something the filmmaker is saving for a later date, when he’s making smaller films. For now, he seems eager to keep making large-scale projects.
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