You can bet your bottom dollar on the fact that if virtually any other director besides Christopher Nolan had made Inception, Warner Bros. would have turned it into a franchise long ago. Not only did the mind-bending heist thriller receive widespread critical acclaim and land an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, but it also raked in a massive $829 million at the box office.
In fact, despite being released ten years ago, Inception is still the only one of the 20 highest-grossing movies in the studio’s history that isn’t connected in some way to either Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings or a DC comic book character. Unfortunately for WB, though, Nolan hasn’t shown much interest in making sequels to any of his features that don’t involve a psychologically-troubled billionaire dressing up as a bat and beating criminals to a pulp.
Of course, there’s been theories making the rounds online that Nolan’s upcoming Tenet could be connected to Inception in some way, but we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones that told us National Treasure 3, Now You See Me 3 and Extraction 2 were in the works before any of them were officially announced – that Nolan may have softened his stance about returning to the well, with an Inception spinoff reportedly in the early stages of development.
According to our intel, the proposed follow-up will take place in the same world but focus on different characters. And while the hope is for Nolan to direct it, he might end up letting his brother Jonathan get behind the camera and only help out in a writing and producing capacity.
There are plenty of stories that could be told in the Inception universe without compromising the original, with Nolan discarding countless ideas when working on the script. And while it would be very out of character for the Dunkirk director to make a spinoff a decade later, if the story is there and he believes in the concept, then Warner Bros. would no doubt happily fast-track it into production.
