“We’re tanking”: Why Christopher Nolan thought ‘The Prestige’ was heading straight “in the toilet”

Posted On October 20, 2025October 20, 2025

After making his blockbuster debut and inadvertently influencing a generation of big-budget movies in the process, Christopher Nolan needed to recharge his creative batteries after the success of Batman Begins.

To do so, he decided to tackle a film that still stands out as an outlier among his filmography. Sure, he returned to period pieces with Oppenheimer and blurred the lines between fact, fiction, reality, and fantasy in Tenet, but The Prestige remains the last time he helmed a relatively inexpensive picture that didn’t try to break any new cinematic ground, whether it was structurally or technologically.

Plenty of directors have been bitten by the studio bug and swore off smaller-scale pictures forever after getting a taste of box office glory, and Nolan was entitled to do the same after his Batman reboot became one of the most acclaimed comic book adaptations of all time, but the last two decades have shown that he’s not the type to rest on his laurels.

It had plenty of big stars, though, with Christian Bale headlining his second consecutive Nolan movie, with the star-studded supported cast bolstered by Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine, and David Bowie, the only actor Nolan has ever begged to appear in one of his films after the legendary musician turned him down the first time.

On paper, a psychological thriller with sci-fi elements, or at least that’s what the trailers hinted at, set in 1890s London, feels like a tough sell to a mainstream audience. One of the easiest ways to get it on people’s radar is with stellar reviews, but before The Prestige held its world premiere, Nolan thought his luck had run out.

“We were supposed to open number four or five that weekend, and our tracking, as they say, was in the toilet,” he recalled to Tom Shone. “But the studio liked the film a lot. They liked their campaign. They were baffled by the tracking. The first reviews came out at the beginning of the week and they were bad. So, we had the premiere on a Tuesday, I think. I remember going to that premiere with a flop.”

Instead of being offered words of encouragement, his team only confirmed his suspicions. “I already had the call from my agent saying, ‘It’s such a shame, because it’s a great movie,’” Nolan continued. “I was like, ‘We’re tanking’. The writing’s on the wall, because they have a lot of information before a film comes out.”

Ironically, because “people’s expectations were so low,” it turned out to be a positive. Everyone in attendance was pleasantly surprised that The Prestige wasn’t, as Nolan had feared, “shitty,” but another great movie from a director who was making them a habit. He hated the feeling of driving to the premiere, “knowing that you fucked up, and that everyone is going to hate your film,” only for the opposite to be true.

In fact, The Prestige ended up opening at number one, turned a tidy profit for Warner Bros, and earned two Academy Award nominations for its art direction and cinematography, which is one of many reasons why it’s impossible to write off any movie until it lands on the big screen.

Related Topics