First details revealed for next Christopher Nolan movie with Matt Damon set to star

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The first details about Christopher Nolan’s next film have finally made their way online.

The popular director, whose nuclear physicist biopic Oppenheimer swept the Oscars earlier this year, is currently developing another film, though has thus far kept many of the specfics under wraps.

Nolan’s body of work includes acclaimed blockbusters such as Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk and the Dark Knight trilogy.

A new report in Deadline reveals that Nolan is set to direct his new film for Universal, the same studio that produced Oppenheimer. He previously enjoyed a longstanding relationship with rival studio Warner Bros, but left amid a disagreement over the pandemic-era release strategy for his underperforming 2020 sci-fi thriller Tenet.

The outlet also claims that the film is eyeing an Imax release date of 17 July 2026, and even gave some insight into who might be playing the lead role.

It is claimed that Matt Damon, who previously assumed supporting roles in Interstellar and Oppenheimer, is in talks to star.

Deadline also reports that filming is expected to begin early next year.

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Earlier this year, Nolan’s longtime producer and wife Emma Thomas teased the forthcoming feature in an interview with Empire.

“I would say it’s very exciting,” she said. “This is the moment where the possibilities are sort of limitless, we haven’t started thinking practicalities, or anything.

“Oppenheimer was so absurdly successful and we feel like we have an opportunity.”

Based on the life of nuclear bomb inventor J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), Oppenheimer won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director.

The film was also his third highest-grossing to date (behind The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises), thanks in part to a bizarre social media phenomenon incongruously pairing the film with the colourful doll comedy Barbie.

In a four-star review of Oppenheimer, The Independent’s critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote:“Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s best and most revealing work. It’s a profoundly unnerving story told with a traditionalist’s eye towards craftsmanship and muscular, cinematic imagination. Here, Nolan treats one of the most contested legacies of the 20th century – that of J Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), the “father of the atomic bomb” – as a mathematical puzzle to be solved.

“The prioritisation of cleverness in Oppenheimer isn’t necessarily a criticism of Nolan – more a testament to who he is as an artist. The detonation of the A-bomb, during its first test in the New Mexico desert, is depicted as booming tufts of flame in extreme close-up, coupled with enraptured onlookers. You sense its primal force, the kind of untapped power that led Oppenheimer to view himself as a kind of American Prometheus (also the title of a 2005 biography Nolan drew heavily from).”