Steven Soderbergh Called the Warner Bros. Exec Who Disliked ‘Memento’ and Told Him to Consider Christopher Nolan for ‘Insomnia’: ‘Take the Meeting’

Brent Lang Executive Editor There’s no stopping “Barbenheimer.” On Monday, “Barbie” will overtake “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” as the highest grossing global release in the history of Warner Bros. Over the weekend, it earned $18.2 million from 12,852 screens in 75 international territories, to push its worldwide gross to a smashing $1.34 billion. And it’s not done breaking records.

Naman Ramachandran “Barbie” is now the all-time box office champion in Ireland with an €8.85 million ($9.57 million) gross. Greta Gerwig’s film has swept past previous champions “Avatar” (€8.75 million) and “Titanic” (€8.39 million) in the country’s all-time top 10 chart. “Spider-Man: No Way Home” occupies fourth place with €7.57 million; “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” fifth with €6.76 million; “The Lion King” sixth with €6.55 million; “Avengers: Endgame” seventh with €6.42 million; “Joker” eighth with €6.4 million; “Mamma Mia!” ninth with €6.39 million; and “The Dark Knight” 10th with €6.31 million.

Oppenheimer marked the sixth time Cillian Murphy starred in a film directed by Christopher Nolan following The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception and Dunkirk.

Universal and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer debuted in more than 500 locations in Korea on Tuesday, capitalizing on the Liberation Day national holiday. The epic bowed to $4.3M, capturing 44% market share for the day in a highly competitive environment.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Greta Gerwig revealed in an interview with Hollywood First Look during her “Barbie” press tour that Timothée Chalamet visited the film’s set in London and lamented over not being able to star in the film. Gerwig directed Chalamet in both “Lady Bird” and “Little Women.” The filmmaker previously told CinemaBlend that Chalamet and her muse Saoirse Ronan were courted for cameo appearances in “Barbie” but scheduling conflicts got in the way. “I tried to get them both in it.

Barbie‘s dream house full of box office keeps getting stuffed with cash with the Greta Gerwig-directed Mattel doll adaptation becoming the highest grossing Warner Bros. movie ever in the studio’s 100 year history at the domestic box office with $537.4M, unseating previous champ, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight which made $534.9M back in 2008.

At this point in their respective careers, Steven Soderbergh and Christopher Nolan are household names for cinephiles. But once upon a time, in the early ’00s, Soderbergh needed to help Nolan get his foot in the door when it came to his entry into studio filmmaking.

Steven Soderbergh had a hand in Christopher Nolan landing the director’s chair for the 2002 thriller Insomnia. The Command Z director recently recalled that he reached out to Warner Bros. bosses to suggest they take a meeting with Nolan.

If you don’t know the history between Steven Soderbergh and Christopher Nolan, then you should do a bit of Googling. The short version is this: being one of the early champions of “Memento,” before it was picked up by a distributor, Soderbergh was the go-to person for Nolan’s people to call to ask for a favor.

The U.S. branch of Warner Bros. issued an apology after being called out by the Japan division for engaging with “insensitive” Barbenheimer tweets.

Warner Bros. U.S. has deleted “Barbenheimer” tweets after being criticized by Warner Bros. Japan.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby told Empire magazine they made a pact to shock each other while filming Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” in order to ensure the film did not feel like a boring, overly-planned biopic. This agreement led Phoenix to slap Kirby during the filming of a heated divorce scene between their characters, Napoleon Bonaparte and Joséphine de Beauharnais, Empire reports. “We were using the real words from their divorce in the church,” Kirby said.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Ridley Scott told Empire magazine that Joaquin Phoenix felt clueless two weeks before cameras were set to start rolling on their historical epic “Napoleon.” The film marks a long-in-the-works reunion between the director and the Oscar-winning actor, who worked together over two decades ago on “Gladiator.” Phoenix is headlining the film as the French emperor opposite Venessa Kirby as his wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais. “He’ll come in, and you’re fucking two weeks’ out, and he’ll say, ‘I don’t know what to do’,” Scott said about Phoenix. “I’ll say, ‘What?!’ ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Oh God.

SPOILER ALERT: This interview discusses the events of “Command Z,” now available to purchase on its official website. AI anxieties are only getting higher. Global temperatures are skyrocketing.

EXCLUSIVE: The UK box office is booming thanks to Barbenheimer.

With “Command Z” and “Full Circle” out now, Steven Soderbergh continues build the legend that he’s the busiest filmmaker in show business. Why so busy? Part of the reason is because Soderbergh shoots his own films.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director When Warner Bros. contacted “Charm City Kings” filmmaker Angel Manuel Soto about potentially directing a DC comic book tentpole, he geared up to pitch the studio on a much different movie. “I wanted to pitch ideas, and one of them was the Bane origin story,” Soto recently told Den of Geek magazine.

Just as the global pandemic seemed to profoundly accelerate the demise of movies and theatergoing—something we all cynically assumed would happen, but hell, not that fast! Not so soon! culturally, our internal clocks all have an impending sense of doom that seems to be ticking faster than ever. Climate change is something we presume will destroy our lives eventually, but globally, it’s been unnerving to watch raging forest fires in Australia that appear apocalyptic, or more recently, if you’re a New Yorker, experience firsthand alarming smoke and air quality pollution that looks like it’s been shot by Roger Deakins on the set of “Blade Runner 2049.” Intentional timed or not, this is where Steven Soderbergh and writer Kurt Anderson are coming from with their surprise new sci-fi-ish satirical series, “Command Z” (the Apple key command for “undo,” and specifically the computer power to negate a mistake; the serious was not officially announced until three days prior to release, and not for nothing, we were the only ones that reported about it months ago in advance).

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” director Benny Safdie expands his acting career with a prominent supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” He plays Edward Teller, the real-life theoretical physicist known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” Teller joined Oppenheimer to work on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., focusing on nuclear implosion and uranium hydride research. He was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, and had a thick accent, which presented Safdie with one of his biggest acting challenges. “The accent was something I was so nervous about,” Safdie recently told Vulture.

Everyone didn’t stop going to the movies on Monday with Barbenheimer in full force: Warner Bros posted the best Monday at the domestic box office with Barbie grossing $26.1M while Universal’s Christopher Nolan pic Oppenheimer wasn’t shabby with $12.6M.