Jonathan Nolan still wants to finish Westworld
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are "completionists" who'd like a chance to see Westworld to its planned conclusion
Aux News westworld
Few moves were more shocking, in the David Zaslav-led Warner Bros. apocalypse of 2022, than removing Westworld from HBO after its cancelation. Yes, the show was complicated and confounding, and yes, viewership declined over the seasons. But it was a keystone series for HBO in the late 2010s, a sprawling, stylish sci-fi epic with some unforgettable performances. For the show to just be dropped after all that felt like a disservice to the series, and its lack of closure haunted the fans, the stars, and the creators alike. “Jonah and I have always had an ending in mind that we hope to reach. We have not quite reached it yet,” co-creator Lisa Joy said at the time of cancellation.
Her husband and co-creator Jonathan Nolan still has hopes of reaching it. “We’re completionists,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in a new interview. “It took me eight years and a change of director to get Interstellar made. We’d like to finish the story we started.”
Nolan is generous about getting dropped from HBO, pointing out that ad-supportive services like Roku and Tubi, where Westworld now lives, can reach a bigger audience anyway. And he knows, too, that in television, sometimes the journey gets cut short. “I’m so fucking proud of what we made. It was an extraordinary experience. I think it would be a mistake to look back and only feel regret [over how it ended],” he said. “But there’s still very much a desire to finish it.”
It’s unclear what “finishing” Westworld will look like, if it does come to pass. Getting any more money out of Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery to shoot another season or a movie seems an unlikely proposition. Nolan and Joy could shop a movie elsewhere or complete the story as a graphic novel, as THR suggested. (Star Evan Rachel Wood, for one, would like to get “the payoff at the end to see where it was all going.”) The one thing Nolan will not do is reign in the ambition of his twisty puzzle box storytelling. “You put everything you have into one movie or one season. If you get a chance to go again, then great,” he told THR of what he’s learned in his career. “If the ‘lesson’ was to ease back on the complexity or the weirdness of something, I don’t want to learn that lesson.”
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I’d be perfectly okay with Nolan & Joy just telling us what the ending they had in mind was, so everyone (the audience, the cast, the crew) can move on to work and watch other things.
Yeah normally I’d either not care at all, or prefer to see it made in full, but for Westworld in particular, I’d actually be completely fine with, like, a 2,000-word summary of whatever season 5 would have been.
Like what Mike Flanagan did when The Midnight Club was released.I wish more people would do that. It sucks as a viewer to not get closure and makes me less willing to try new shows that aren’t surefire renewals.
I hope they get the chance to finish it.
What bums me out is that we’ll never get to see their adaptation of the Michael Crichton book Sphere, which has been one of my favorite books since I was a kid.
Is it better than the movie, which I vaguely remember watching in the 90s?
So much.
It felt more ending than cliffhanger to be honest, Hosts live forever in AI heaven when humanity dies off
It felt more ending than cliffhanger to be honest, Hosts live forever in AI heaven when humanity dies off
I think Nolan and Joy have made some incredible stuff but they really struggle with some bad “mystery box” tendencies. Westworld had some very high highs but it certainly padded it out unnecessarily here and there. And I don’t know what they hell they were thinking with The Peripheral. The book was a page-turner, but the show struggled to make anything relevant or engaging with the premise.
The Peripheral should have been a no brainer but they decided to stray so far from the source material it was barely even the same story.
At least the Haptic Recon battle early in the season was pretty awesome.
That was cool! And the cast was decent, too. It’s just a shame they didn’t let them do anything.
Yeah I was reasonably impressed by the cast list when it was announced so I was hopeful for a good adaptation.I’m glad Apple picked up Neuromancer, they’ve been doing killer sci fi lately so I hope they do a better job than Amazon.
They were minimally involved with The Peripheral. They weren’t the creators or
showrunners and they didn’t write or direct any episodes. It’s the same
with Fallout, except Nolan actually directed a few episodes. They seem
to be for Amazon what JJ Abrams was for shows like Lost (after season 1)
and Fringe.
Okay, that explains a ton to me. I was so annoyed seeing their names on that show as it became apparent it was very much not interested in telling the book’s story.
JJ Abrams was involved only in *the pilot* of Lost not season 1.
Four seasons and a musical.
The last season ended in a way that works as a finale at least. They could continue for one more, but it’s not a terrible place to end it.
No, thank you.
Felt fine with one season
I don’t need a graphic novel, give me a book…hell give me a book for every season I am totally happy with it. I really liked it. Sure maybe it wasn’t always the best series ever…but compared to some series that get season after season…this would have deserved to get the conclusion the creators wanted. At least thats my opinion.
I respect Nolan’s desire to see his project to the end, but there is so much else he could be doing. Honestly, I’d prefer to see Nolan work on a revival of Person of Interest. Evil is ending soon, so Emmerson will be free to at least tee off a sequel.
The question is will the returning star be able to effectively play Zombie Reese remotely from his MAGA compound?
Evil never ends
Evil dies tonight!
Both Nolan and Emmerson still involved in Fallout. Unless…
Not to be that guy, but it’s really been irking me to see how common it’s become to use “reign in” when you mean “rein in.” Rein in means pull on the reins to slow the horse down, reign in means… I don’t know, put a king in it?
i’d love a sense8 style final episode
Think what we got was a good ending for what we had, but…I also kinda think Nolan and Joy are some of the few creators that nail endings. The Person of Interest series finale is maybe one of the best network finales in recent memory. Everything logically follows and gives closure without completely closing the door.
Person of Interest also had the benefit of not having two underwhelming seasons that caused the show to lose most of the audience… and the good will it originally had.
POI actually lost a lot of viewership when the show became more Sci-Fi and serialized, and lots of boomer Chuds were upset about Shaw and Root getting added to the main cast. I could actually see a continuation of POI work which would be more like Season 1-3 focussing on cases of the week and a diverse rogue’s gallery with the AI/Sci-Fi stuff more in the background.
I’m in this camp, I think the current ending is actually fine?Spoilers. Humanity is extinct. The AIs have uploaded into their private paradise. For as long as those servers last, at least. I’m just not sure where you go from there. It feels complete to me.
Nolan and Joy were already working on Westworld during the final few seasons of POI. They were still involved but less. I think Greg Plageman as Co-Showrunner, Denise Thé and other writers were what made POI really work, and you can see that in Westworld that someone is absent who should tell Nolan “Look, those are some good ideas, now you need to make a good show out of it”. POI also benefitted from the case of the week approach combined with several different serialized storylines, so failures in some aspect don’t crater the whole show. And uhh, from people on the set who kept Caviezel’s crazy at bay.
I alos wish they would continue POI, there are certainly hooks for a continuation, but I guess the show doesn’t have enough mass appeal and nowadays would probably get like a 10 episode order which would do away with cases of the week entirely.
They may have an ending in mind but there’s absolutely no way they have or had it all planned out.
Only if they can get back the energy and creativity of season 1. Because otherwise, I don’t care.
They ended on the human race going extinct!I don’t care what they were planning to do with the remaining pieces of software going through another Westworld loop on the server.Just tweet what you had in mind. I’m sure it’s lame and unsatisfying, because there’s no reason for humans to care about the story once humans are extinct and the remaining characters are all robots.
So, did you think Wall·E sucked until the humans showed up and that Deckard was a true hero in Blade Runner?
I know you’re being sarcastic, but those two examples illustrate my point. WALL-E only works as a story because of the reveal that there’s still a humanity left to save. If it was just WALL-E hanging out on the destroyed Earth with no humans anywhere in the galaxy, it wouldn’t have been a story. It only becomes a story once WALL-E leaves Earth and finds the remnants of humanity, and then leads them to repopulate Earth. Deckard, of course, *is* a replicant, but Blade Runner is only a story because there’s still humanity on Earth for the replicants to threaten. There’s a reason they never made a movie with a fully replicant cast on one of the off-world colonies.Once humanity is extinct, the story is over. Westworld ceased to be a story towards the end of its last episode. It doesn’t matter what happens next.
Personally, I thought the first half hour or so of WALL-E was amazing, and when the humans arrived I was disappointed– but to each their own.
So if the first half of a story is better than the second half, the solution just to do the first half twice?
Guess toy story, cars, Lion King, certain episodes of black mirror, X-Men, are all bad films LMAO if you can’t understand anthropomorphism and how it can do more to reveal the human condition than media about actual humans then I’m just sorry that the public education system failed you so badly.
But the robots of Westworld are humanities “children” and its legacy. So I think there is a story to be told still. But to each their own
Deckard, of course, *is* a replicantI know that’s Scott’s take, but it is a incredibly stupid one that destroys the entire point of the movie. Why does Roy Batty save Deckard? If Deckard is a replicant there’s no point — replicants saving other replicants. But the whole point of the movie is that the fake human Roy Batty is a better person than the real human Deckard because Batty has empathy. And also treats his girlfriend Pris better than Deckard does Rachel.
You’ve answered your own question. He saves Deckard because he realises the value of life. Deckard being a replicant is irrelevant, life is life.
But there’s nothing noble or empathetic in saving your own kind — that’s just in-group selfishness. Realizing that someone outside your kind is as valuable as one of you is the heart of empathy.
It’s irrelevant to Roy whether Deckard is a replicant, that’s the point, he doesn’t see any difference between him and a human.
There’s also a question of whether Roy even knows.
If they just want to finish it, they can write it up as a novel.
It’s “rein in.” Not “reign in.”
I suspect the budgetary requirements for this finale would be excessive. They’re previously argued against a lower cost season.
The cynic in me says they only want to do it because of the money. It’s been off the air (and streaming!) for long enough that it will not be in the zeitgeist anymore. Move on. The real world stuff was only slightly interesting, so when two entire seasons took place there, well, it was literally NOT Westworld anymore.Plus based on how much of a step down s3 was from s2 and s1, then s4 was from s3, I’m not sure I want to see more at this point.
They should take inspiration from Star Trek TNG and call it ‘West of Both Worlds’.
To understand why the show was canceled, it’s interesting to take a look at the ratings.For the first two seasons, the show got 1.6-1.8m viewers, with peaks over 2m.For the third season, it never rose above 900,000 viewers.The fourth season got 0.3 million viewers in average (but some people watched it instead on HBO Max).Yet, the budget had almost doubled between S1 ($88m) and S4 ($160m) despite later seasons having just eight episodes.Sure, ratings are not the main thing for HBO, as it’s mostly about getting and keeping subscribers, but Westworld was also failing big time in that regard. The first two seasons would generate a lot of online conversation. There was almost zero buzz coming from season 4. Nobody really cared. The show was no longer something people were curious to watch with their own eyes after hearing about it. And, in the meantime, Succession stayed consistently around 0.5-0.7m viewers (it actually peaked on its final season, despite HBO Max) and got HBO much more attention.Once again, David Zaslav is definitely a disgrace as a CEO for the entire group, but canceling Westworld was definitely the right call here.
Not! (imho)
I loved the first season and muddled through the second season. Rather than the “thinky” stuff I liked in S1, the second season went with “hey, let’s just kill stuff over and over again and then kill some more stuff” and the thinky-bits fell to the side. My question then: Is it worth watching seasons 3 and/or 4 or just leave the series in the past and forget about it?
They shouldn’t have made seasons 3 and 4 so bad if they wanted a season 5.
1) Tbh I think the show ended pretty conclusively. I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing what they had in mind for the final season, but the ending we got was one I found pretty satisfying.2) I know I’m in the vocal minority but I loved this show all the way through. Sure, it was incredibly silly and self-serious at times, but I really enjoyed how it turned into a well-budgeted cyberpunk show in its back half.
No thanks. The Pilot was a masterpiece, the first season was excellent and then, what a disaster. Jonathan Nolan has good ideas but the execution tend to disappoint and without his brother he can’t deliver.