(Credits: Far Out / Alex J. Berliner / ABI Images)
Fri 7 November 2025 13:30, UK
A director attaching themselves to a movie is no guarantee that it’ll end up being made, as some know more than others, although Christopher Nolan usually sees things through to the end when he picks up a new potential production.
At the opposite end of the scale, there’s Guillermo del Toro. The three-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker has spent years developing films that never shot a single frame of footage, whittling away over a decade of his professional life in the pursuit of pictures that never came to fruition, which has got to be frustrating when it’s happened to him so often.
Since he became Christopher Nolan, the brand, the knight of the realm and Oscar winner has been able to do whatever he wants. That means it’s highly unlikely he’ll ever be announced as the director of a movie that never gets made again, and explains why the only two times it happened came before he delivered The Dark Knight, his first billion-dollar blockbuster.
And, no, one of them isn’t the Howard Hughes biopic. Nolan was crushed when his version of the story was mothballed after Martin Scorsese got his in front of the cameras first, and it stood every chance of being a career-defining performance for Jim Carrey, but he technically didn’t drop out of the director’s chair when the entire thing was abandoned for reasons outside of his control.
He did for The Prisoner, though, his mooted adaptation of the classic 1960s series. In the mid-2000s, in between his Batman blockbusters, the Memento architect was revealed as the man to bring the dystopian psychological sci-fi to the big screen, but by the end of the decade, he’d vacated the position.
“Chris Nolan has dropped out of it,” producer Barry Mendel shared in 2009. “But we have a first draft by David and Janet Peoples, who wrote Twelve Monkeys, and David wrote Unforgiven, and it’s a good draft, and we’re working on the script right now.” Fast forward to today, and we’re still waiting. There was a small-screen remake, but The Prisoner remains unmade as a feature-length cinematic event.
Nolan admitted during an appearance on Happy Sad Confused that the biggest reason he ditched the picture was that he “couldn’t crack it,” which was a typically vague response. It deals with several themes that have been prominent parts of his other pictures, but for some reason, wrangling the core concept of a ’60s TV show into a workable movie was beyond his reach.
He also penned an adaptation of the Ruth Rendell novel, The Keys to the Street, in the late 1990s, and planned to direct it after Insomnia. Despite saying “it’s a really cool script,” Nolan acknowledged that it “has a lot in common with the three films I’ve made, so it may not be the right film for me to do next.” He ultimately dropped it entirely, instead focusing on Batman Begins.
The Hughes biopic was ripped from his grasp, which leaves The Prisoner and The Keys to the Street as the only titles that Nolan was announced to be directing that dropped out of, which isn’t a bad return, all things considered.
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