Inception was a real box office dream for Christopher Nolan.
And when the movie was released, the writer-director had already shown that he was also a master
of sequels with his batty follow-up, The Dark Knight.
So it seemed entirely plausible that Nolan would eventually go deeper into the layers
of subconscious reality with Inception 2.
"You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger darling."
But despite an ambiguous ending and some serious interest in a follow-up film, it just hasn't
happened yet.
Here's why.
Limbo
Inception was released right before The Dark Knight Rises closed out Nolan's three-part
trek through Gotham City.
While he wasn't traditionally a sequel man before, his Dark Knight trilogy seemed to
change his tune.
In fact, he said that while he originally conceived of Inception as a one-shot cinematic
experience, he wouldn't close the door on a possible return, simply because of the outcome
of his Batman experience.
He told Deadline:
"I've always liked the potential of the world.
It's an infinite, or perhaps I should say infinitesimal world that fascinates me…
I think of Inception as one film, but that's how I approach all of my films.
When I was making Batman Begins, I certainly didn't have any thoughts of doing a second
Batman film, let alone a third.
You never quite know where your creative interests are going to take you.
But when I was making Inception, I viewed it as a standalone movie."
Virtual reality
To further explore the dream-within-a-dream world he'd created, Nolan originally eyed
a video game as the preferred medium for a follow-up because it would offer an even more
expansive place for exploring all the layers of his dream world.
Plus, let's face it.
Some parts of the movie just looked like video games, with all that Minecraft-style world-building
and how the heroes stormed the frosty fortress like something straight out of GoldenEye.
Hey, you know you'd play it.
The kick
Even if Nolan did want to consider stepping back into the world of Inception, he's kept
himself pretty busy with other projects.
After he returned to Gotham for the final Dark Knight installment after Inception's
release, he ventured into all-new territory with 2014's Interstellar.
He's also written and directed a World War II epic called Dunkirk that's due in theaters
in 2017.
Nolan's shown he has the ability to step back into one filmmaking world after pressing pause
on it, but the more movies that stack up between Inception and its hypothetical sequel, the
less likely it seems he'll ever return.
"You promised, you promised!"
Going graphic
The cast has been pretty swamped since then, too.
After Inception, DiCaprio headlined in a series of commercial and critical succcesses, starring
in J. Edgar, Django Unchained, The Great Gatsby, and The Wolf of Wall Street in rapid succession
— then, after five Oscar nominations over 22 years, he won Best Actor for his leading
role in 2015's The Revenant.
More recently, DiCaprio has turned his attention to philanthropic filmmaking with the documentary
Before the Flood and producing duties on his upcoming big-screen Captain Planet adaptation.
Tom Hardy has also starred in a few big-deal pictures you might have heard of, like The
Dark Knight Rises, Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Revenant.
And Joseph Gordon-Levitt went on to make his own directorial debut in Don Jon and starred
in a bunch of hits like Looper and Snowden.
Surely they'd all be willing to pencil in another project with Nolan if he asked them
to.
But scheduling a time that might work for all of these people could conceivably be pretty
complicated.
Elephant budget
Saito might've had deep enough pockets to make a second movie happen, but in the real
world, budgets are a real wake-up call for studios looking into making a sequel.
Inception cost a whopping $160 million to make, and it's expected that a sequel would
have to be even bigger and better to truly impress, meaning it'd cost even more.
In an era when sequels aren't always a box office guarantee, that's a risky move Warner
Bros. might not be ready to make.
Drop the top
But even with all that in mind, it's hard to shake that spinning top and not want to
see more.
One of the main reasons Inception fans have been dreaming of a sequel is that the ending
seemed to raise more questions than it answered.
Was Cobb really reunited with his children at long last in the waking world?
Did the spinning top that was his totem eventually fall, revealing that he'd finally escaped
the brain plane?
But according to Nolan, that last scene wasn't meant to be so confusing.
He told Princeton University graduates in 2015:
"The way the end of that film worked, Leonardo DiCaprio's character Cobb — he was off with
his kids, he was in his own subjective reality.
He didn't really care anymore, and that makes a statement: perhaps, all levels of reality
are valid.
The camera moves over the spinning top just before it appears to be wobbling, it was cut
to black."
You got all that?
"Your condescension is as always much appreciated darling, thank you."
The short version: even if you think that there's more to tell about the final shot
of Inception, Nolan doesn't.
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