Plenty of shared universes have fallen by the wayside in recent years because the brains behind them were too focused on using their movies to tell audiences that this was only the beginning and bigger and better things were set to come in the future, but completely forgot to give them a reason to care in the first place, leading to a series of exposition-filled blockbusters that left plenty of plot threads dangling before ultimately being abandoned completely.
After a rocky few years, the DCEU seems to have overcome the majority of the criticism that dogged the franchise’s early days, which wasn’t helped by the fact that there were so many people involved in overseeing Warner Bros.’ comic book series at various points. While Zack Snyder was the filmmaker with the keys to the kingdom, at some stage he ended up reporting to Geoff Johns, Jon Berg, Diane Nelson, Greg Silverman, Toby Emmerich and Walter Hamada, as the studio boardroom appeared to be in a constant state of disarray.
With the ship now righted and the DCEU finally established as a popular and viable alternative to the MCU, there’ve been reports that WB are keen to appoint either J.J. Abrams or James Gunn as the architect tasked to execute their unified vision. However, we’ve now heard that they’re also setting their sights much higher than that, as they want Christopher Nolan to return to the fold and help shepherd the franchise’s brave new era as well, alongside Gunn and Abrams.
According to our sources – the same ones who told us Green Lantern and Justice League Dark shows are coming to HBO Max, and that Ahsoka Tano will appear in The Mandalorian season 2, all of which were correct – Warner Bros. aren’t expecting him to start suddenly focusing all of his energy on churning out comic book blockbusters again, but they have been speaking with Nolan and are hoping that he’ll agree to return in at least some capacity to oversee in-development projects and produce, with an eye to getting behind the camera himself in the future.
Of course, Nolan already acted as executive producer on all three of Zack Snyder’s DCEU movies, but it remains unclear how involved he was with each respective production, and we know that the Inception creator generally doesn’t tend to produce many projects that he’s not directing. There’s also no guarantees that he’d even agree to take on a bigger role, but the studio have extended the invitation regardless and the ball is now firmly in his court.
