Christopher Nolan is one of the most popular and roundly respected directors working in Hollywood today. Not only does he make acclaimed epics like “Dunkirk,” but his movies are also remarkably popular. “Oppenheimer” made nearly $1 billion and won Best Picture at the Oscars. That blending of financial success and industry accolades is extremely rare. But Nolan wasn’t always an A-lister who could pick the projects he wanted essentially at will. Case in point: Even though he’s making “The Odyssey” as we speak, he previously flirted with another Greek mythology movie that ended up going to a different director.
Recently, writer David Goyer spoke with the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast in honor of the 20th anniversary of “Batman Begins,” which Nolan directed. “I had heard that Chris might be developing a new Batman movie and I remember telling my agent, ‘Well, it’s never going to get made,” Goyer said. “None of those guys could get it made.”
To Goyer’s point, many writers had been trying to get a “Batman” movie off the ground at Warner Bros. after the failure of Joel Schumacher’s “Batman & Robin.” Nolan became the man to make it happen, but that was only after, according to Goyer, he was offered DC’s beloved superhero as a consolation prize for not getting to direct 2004’s “Troy.” Here’s what he had to say about it:
“The irony is that it appears that Batman was a consolation prize for Chris because he had been developing ‘Troy.’ Then, at some point, ‘Troy’ was shifted away and given to [Wolfgang Petersen]. I think Wolfgang Petersen had been developing ‘Batman vs. Superman,’ so I think they did a swap. That was meant to be the consolation prize, I guess.”
Christopher Nolan directing Troy would have reshaped his career
There’s a whole lot to unpack there, but let’s start with the fact that yes, Wolfgang Petersen was slated to direct an exceedingly dark version of “Batman vs. Superman” written by Andrew Kevin Walker (“Seven”) in the early 2000s, more than a decade before Zack Snyder made it a reality with 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” As Goyer tells it, Warner Bros. let that version go and Petersen ended up directing “Troy,” which starred Brad Pitt in a retelling of Homer’s “The Iliad.”
Meanwhile Nolan, who was coming off of “Memento” and “Insomnia,” was then offered the chance to get a new “Batman” movie off the ground. A 2013 article from Deadline revealed that “Nolan was going to direct ‘Troy’ (released in 2004) but wasn’t feeling it,” and because he’d always had an interest in Batman, he pitched his take on the franchise to WB executives. The rest is history, with 2005’s “Batman Begins” completely reinventing the superhero on the big screen.
That paved the way for 2008’s “The Dark Knight,” which remains one of the most acclaimed mainstream blockbusters of all time, as well as 2012’s “The Dark Knight Rises,” which was, for a time, the highest-grossing DC movie ever. However, it doesn’t quite sound like, based on the Deadline report, that “Batman” was in any way a consolation prize for Nolan. In any event, it is interesting to consider a world where he directed “Troy,” which was indeed a big movie, instead of doing “Batman Begins,” because it would have changed the entire trajectory of his career.
Meanwhile, Nolan is currently filming “The Odyssey” for Universal Pictures, a Greek epic with a stacked cast that is also based on the works of Homer (to simplify, it’s essentially a sequel to the events of “Troy”). However serious his flirtation with “Troy” was all those years ago, it’s fascinating that it’s all come full circle in some way more than 20 years later.
“The Odyssey” is set to hit theaters on July 17, 2026.
