Cillian Murphy will play J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s next film, set to be released July 21, 2023.

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Following rumours the pair would team up once again, Murphy has been officially cast to play the American physicist whose involvement in the Manhattan Project led him to be dubbed the “father of the atomic bomb”.

The $100million film, officially titled Oppenheimer, is written by Nolan and produced by Emma Thomas. It’s based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin titled American Prometheus: The Triumph And Tragedy Of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer marks the latest collaboration between Murphy and Nolan, having previously teamed up on Dunkirk, Inception and Batman Begins.

The film will be released via Universal Pictures, after they won the rights in a bidding war against the likes of Paramount, Sony and Warner Bros.

Almost every film by Nolan since 2002’s Insomnia has been released with Warner Bros. Their partnership included The Dark Knight trilogy, Dunkirk, Inception and Tenet, while they handled the international release of The Prestige and Interstellar too.

Nolan’s switch to Universal comes after the director criticised Warner Bros. over their 2021 release strategy where films simultaneously released on streaming service HBO Max.

In a statement at the time, Nolan said: “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find they were working for the worst streaming service.

“Warner Bros. had an incredible machine for getting a filmmaker’s work out everywhere, both in theatres and in the home, and they are dismantling it as we speak. They don’t even understand what they’re losing. Their decision makes no economic sense, and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.”

Universal described Nolan’s next project as an “epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.”

Production on Oppenheimer will start in early 2022.