Christopher Nolan has created several masterpieces, but his latest film shows that his advantage has waned. Did he reach the top? Is his era over?
Genius and madness in a single thought. As any great artist knows, not every crazy concept always makes it to land.
Too much success can lead to a problem: the audience starts to ignore what you want to say because you're starting from a success perspective. Your view of doing so is now distorted by fame and fortune.
Christopher Nolan discovered this in the movie "Creed", and there are two main points.
First, Christopher Nolan's narrative remains unchanged, but the audience is already bored
"Creed", released in September 2020, has a Douban score of 7.6, an IMBD score of 7.4, and a Rotten Tomatoes freshness rating of 69%. Most fans of "Creed" are still disappointed.
Over the years, Christopher Nolan has excelled at layering his narrative concept in a non-linear way to ensure it puts the viewer on the edge of the seat while extracting the biggest conspiracy from the plot
Fragments of Memory, Inception, Interstellar, and Creed all use their timelines to make viewers question what happens in the film. This is an interesting trick that many great filmmakers use to keep their story flowing.
For Creed, he only confused the audience with the critics. His previous successes arguably convinced Nolan that his narrative ideas were unassailable and that his signature complexity was universally needed. Frankly, "Creed" made Nolan feel lazy. The audience is too familiar with the narrative and a little tedious, and it's the work of a filmmaker/director who is too comfortable in their comfort zone.
Great filmmakers are always challenging what they know and what they can do — as Kubrick, Wells, Coppola, and Anderson demonstrate — but Nolan seems to have lost himself in an inflated sense of grandeur.
Second, the storm between Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros.
"Creed" is Nolan's highest ever film to produce, pre-creation and post-marketing cost about $360 million, to break even, the box office needs at least about $500 million, and as of now", "Creed" has accumulated only about $340 million in the global box office, which makes the producer Warner Bros. will lose about $100 million.
When Creed failed, we saw the iconic director begin to lose his cool demeanor.
He scurried around, insulting the streaming service — he even had to apologize to the head of Netflix for his comments — and in one interview shockingly slammed Warner Bros. HBO Max as "the worst streaming service."
A staunch traditionalist, Christopher Nolan often expressed his preference for theatrical distribution. While this isn't a bad stance in itself, he seems to lack empathy for modern audiences and how they want to pass on his films to them.
As the global new champions intensified, the rising cost of cinema travel, combined with the relatively inexpensive cost of home streaming, forced changes in the years in which Nolan worked within the studio system.
He left Warner Bros. and moved to Universal Pictures, marking the end of an era for the filmmaker. But it was also a fresh start for Nolan.
Christopher Nolan will never be a bad filmmaker. He's too good at the work he does for it. But he stagnated and needed to accept the world that now existed around him. At the same time, we will wait with bated breath for Nolan's new work "Oppenheimer" in 2023, and what changes will Nolan's new environment be, which is worth looking forward to.