Christopher Nolan's Interstellar Is A Box Office Hit All Over Again 10 Years Later

Paramount Pictures

If it wasn't already crystal clear that Christopher Nolan is box office gold, that was proven in a big way over the weekend. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. re-released the filmmaker's 2014 sci-fi blockbuster "Interstellar" in theaters both in North America and overseas in honor of its 10-year anniversary. To say that the re-release went over well would be a bit of an understatement.

"Interstellar" made $4.6 million domestically in its first weekend of re-release, good enough to place sixth on the charts for the weekend. Most impressive of all? The film was only playing on 165 screens, most IMAX, meaning that it scored a ridiculous per-screen average close to $28,000. The showings were booked solid. This is especially interesting for a movie that was a little bit divisive in its day. /Film's original review of "Interstellar" questioned whether Nolan's film was "too ambitious."

Be that as it may, the film was a massive success in its original run, taking in $681 million worldwide. Time has clearly been kind to it. Case in point, the re-release has earned $26.9 million overseas to date. Thanks to all of its various re-releases over the years, the film now has a running total of $736.7 million and counting. As he proved with "Oppenheimer," Nolan is one of cinema's bulletproof box office bets. Audiences love his work and his name means something so far as selling tickets goes. That's hard to come by these days.

The film centers on an ex-pilot-turned-farmer named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), who must leave his family and a foundering Earth behind to lead an expedition traveling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars. The stacked cast also includes a young Timothée Chalamet, Anne Hathaway ("Rachel Getting Married"), Jessica Chastain ("Zero Dark Thirty"), Topher Grace ("That '70s Show"), and Casey Affleck ("Gone Baby Gone"). 

Paramount Pictures

Nolan is now in a class of directors whose name alone can sell a film. This is a small list, mind you, that includes the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg, alongside a choice few others. It's a situation where the director is, in a sense, a movie star. It doesn't happen overnight either, but moviegoers have come to trust Nolan implicitly. That started, in earnest, when "The Dark Knight" became a then-rare $1 billion smash hit, one that transcended the superhero genre. That, in turn, allowed his original sci-fi epic "Inception" to thrive well beyond what the genre can typically sustain outside of major franchises.

That then paved the way for "The Dark Knight Rises," which made $1.2 billion and was the biggest DC movie ever until "Aquaman" arrived in 2018. Nolan also managed to turn "Dunkirk" into a blockbuster war epic. The only black spot on his resume is "Tenet," which was released during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and truly can never be judged fairly. Had it been released under better circumstances, who knows?

Nolan truly proved his worth when last year's "Oppenheimer" made nearly $1 billion worldwide on its way to a Best Picture win at the Oscars. All of this to say, we're looking at a rare talent, one whose films only grow their audiences with time. That's why "Interstellar" was playing to jam-packed houses all over the world this past weekend a full decade after it first hit theaters. Does this mean we're going to see more Nolan re-releases in the future? Almost certainly. It also bodes well for the filmmaker's latest, which is due to hit theaters in summer 2026.

The "Interstellar" re-release is in theaters now, or you can grab the movie on 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD via Amazon.