In a rare move for something that’s not a sequel or a superhero movie (as far as we know), Warner Bros. has announced that Christopher Nolan’s next film will be in theaters on July 21, 2017, and that’s it. That’s all we know. This comes from Variety, which even notes that “the dating announcement was the first news of the project.”
So what is this movie? Well, Nolan’s filmography can basically be narrowed down into two camps: Heavy dramas that mask plot holes and/or hard-to-explain concepts with thrilling visuals and famous actors, and movies about Batman. Warner Bros. is already working on a bunch of Batman and Batman-related movies, so it’s probably not about Batman. That leaves us with this being a totally new concept, which is a little harder to predict. The Prestige was a story about magicians and revenge, and it had a crazy David Bowie twist. Inception was a heist movie about dealing with reality (or not). Interstellar was a sci-fi drama about how love is magic. It sort of goes from grounded ideas (like David Bowie) to more vague and cosmic things (like the power of love). So, following that trend, the new movie will be more vague and more cosmic than Interstellar, with a plot that doesn’t necessarily make sense.
Finally, here’s our guess as to the plot of Nolan’s new film: Leonardo DiCaprio will play himself, and on the day he’s supposed to begin filming the new Christopher Nolan movie, the entire cast disappears. Everyone is gone but him, and he spends the next decade trying to figure out what happens. Then, one day, Cillian Murphy (also as himself) arrives out of nowhere, and he tells DiCaprio that he has to travel into an alternate dimension in order to save Christopher Nolan. In a scene that is never explained, DiCaprio invents a machine that allows him to move between dimensions, but when he uses it he finds himself in the home of—you guessed it—David Bowie (as himself). Bowie tells DiCaprio that he has to move one dimension further, so he uses the machine again, and then (here’s that classic Nolan head-exploder) an actor playing DiCaprio stands up in the theater and yells “It worked!” then he runs out and the credits roll. Everyone will love it at first, but the next day on Twitter they’ll all agree that it was terrible.