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Christopher Nolan was planning a Howard Hughes biopic with Jim Carrey
Christopher Nolan is now, perhaps inarguably, the defining filmmaker of the 21st century. But while Nolan has been synonymous with cinema for 20 years now, there was a time when he was an unknown up-and-coming director just like the rest of them.
With The Odyssey breaking all sorts of box office records and on its way to becoming one of the highest-grossing films of all time — and perhaps Christopher Nolan’s second consecutive Best Picture winner after taking home the prize for Oppenheimer a few years back — its acclaimed director’s career is naturally being examined and celebrated, with pundits trying to detail how he got here and decipher where he’ll go next.
Before signing on to direct Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan was developing a Howard Hughes movie with Jim Carrey in the lead role
Nolan has essentially been a household name since The Dark Knight, which became the first superhero movie to gross over $1 billion and generally broke new ground for the genre at large.
Before he was given the keys to the Batman franchise, however, his only two feature film efforts were Memento and Insomnia: both well-respected heady thrillers (particularly the former) but not necessarily projects that scream “Batman’s savior.”
At the time that Nolan was tapped to direct Batman Begins in 2003, reports indicated that he was developing a Howard Hughes biopic with Jim Carrey attached to star and had turned in a script to the studio. As Variety noted at the time, however, the “timing of that film is unclear since the Martin Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio Hughes rival pic The Aviator could be in production first.”
was doing some research into who was responsible for hiring Christopher Nolan to do Batman Begins and came across this insane paragraph pic.twitter.com/Nj4qtcwUYi
— Eric Italiano (@ericitaIiano) July 28, 2026
Ultimately, Nolan signed on to Batman and abandoned his Hughes feature, while Scorsese would go on to release The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes in 2004.
Although Batman Begins went on to make a modest box office haul of $375.4 million (against a $150 million budget), it established the more important goal of getting movie audiences excited about the character after the disaster that was 1997’s Batman & Robin.