LONDON, ENGLAND - MAY 15: Tom Cruise attends the Global Premiere of "Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning" in Leicester Square on May 15, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by Dave Benett/WireImage)" width="1000" height="800" class="gu-image" /> Throughout film history, there have been vanishingly few directors whose brand names reach the heights of the movie stars who log time in front of the camera. That’s natural; we see people like Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Paul Newman, Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise in movie after movie, sometimes experiencing a love-at-first-sight lightning-strike moment, sometimes developing a relationship over many years, and sometimes a combination of the two. Directors, for the most part, remain hidden, with a select few – Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese – popping through to broader public consciousness, a process that seems to take twice as long. (Martin Scorsese became a commercial prospect roughly 30 years into his career.)
It’s a little surprising, then, that the newest crop of directors reaching for (or in some case, already attaining) brand-name status have become the public faces of saving an imperiled theatrical experience. Christopher Nolan was out front to an arguably foolhardy degree, lobbying for theaters to reopen and show his planned 2020 summer blockbuster Tenet before Covid vaccines were in place. He was understandably pilloried at the time, though now he’s celebrated for his big-canvas vision to the point where an Imax re-release of Tenet (at a safer time for public health) was a big ticket-seller for Warner Bros and helped inspire a similar reissue of his once-maligned sci-fi epic Interstellar.
