There’s a simple reason Interstellar 2 will never happen

After its extraordinary return to IMAX theaters, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar has just dropped on Netflix in the US – but if it’s whet your appetite for Interstellar 2, don’t get too excited.

Interstellar had a respectable run in cinemas when it premiered in 2014. It earned a 72% score on Rotten Tomatoes (not bad by any stretch, but not on the level of Oppenheimer, The Dark Knight, or Inception), and it made over $680 million worldwide.

However, while its fans may have hailed it as an instant sci-fi classic, time has proved that claim. It came back to cinemas across the world in 2024, earning a whopping $35m (it was so popular that scalpers sold IMAX tickets for nearly 900% profit). Now, many believe it’s Nolan’s best movie.

Work is already underway on Nolan’s next movie, and unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever see Interstellar 2.

Interstellar doesn’t need a sequel

Warner Bros.

Interstellar 2 won’t happen, nor should it. Outside of his Batman trilogy, Nolan hasn’t made any other sequels, and Interstellar’s ending was purposefully ambiguous.

Nolan has never addressed the chances of Interstellar 2 directly, but he laid out his ethos on sequels in an interview with Total Film around Tenet’s release.

“The answer I’ll give you is: the choice to do a sequel or not to do a sequel is not based on any kind of principle of whether I do sequels or not. Each project is assessed on its own merit,” he said.

One thing is clear: Nolan doesn’t want to touch the mystique of Interstellar’s ending. If you’ve not seen it (or you don’t understand it), it ends with Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) initially sacrificing himself so Brand (Anne Hathaway) can reach Edmunds’ planet.

As he’s sucked into a black hole, he ejects from his spacecraft and plummets through a tesseract. He sees his daughter’s bedroom across her entire life, and not only does he discover he was Murph’s ghost all along, but this was always “their” plan to save humanity. This was the only way that Murph, as a grown up, would solve the gravity equation.

Cooper is returned to his own solar system, left floating around Saturn. Miraculously, he’s recovered safely. He reunites with Murph on her deathbed before flying off to find Brand, who’s set up a human colony on Edmunds’ planet.

If that’s not clear enough for you… too bad. “You’re just going to have to go back and see it again,” Nolan told The Daily Beast.

“It’s there for you to make what you make of it. People do always have radically different interpretations of things I put in there, but I know what I think and I don’t like it to have any more validity than the experience you have watching it.”

In the meantime, check out our list of movies you should be excited about in 2025, and catch up with the best movies of 2024.