Rebooting Westworld Before Finishing the Series Is a Mistake

Two summers ago, on a sweltering day in June, I interviewed Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan at their Manhattan apartment. I was there to talk about their then-new Prime Video series, Fallout, but any pandemic-times Esquire reader knew what I was really there for: Westworld.

Also created by Joy and Nolan, Westworld—based on the 1973 sci-fi western written by Michael Crichton—ran for four wonderful, chaotic, and very often senseless (which I say lovingly!) seasons on HBO. Then the network cancelled the series in 2022, before any of its increasingly convoluted storylines could actually pay off. It felt like Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright, Tessa Thompson, and James Marsden would never have the chance to satisfy all the fans who followed the story, which began as a tale of a robot-filled theme park and ended as a fan theory machine filled with supercomputers and brain orbs. Especially considering that HBO went so far as to remove Westworld from its streaming platform.

I asked Nolan and Joy if they ever had Westworld‘s endgame in mind and they lit up. “It was always going to be a story in which these immortal characters would change and we’d find them in very different circumstances,” Nolan said. Joy added, “We always had a plan on where to go with it. Time is a gift. Our ideas will change and grow. I’m curious to see when it happens—if it happens—how it’s changed, or how it’s evolved.”

When it happens? Their words gave me hope that Westworld would return from the Valley Beyond someday—until yesterday’s news. Deadline reported that screenwriter David Koepp (who wrote the scripts for Jurassic Park and two of its sequels) will pen a Westworld film for Warner Bros. Not only that, but “a major filmmaker is circling” the project. Some already think that said big shot is Steven Spielberg, who recently said that he was developing a western. Notably, Koepp wrote Spielberg’s next movie, Disclosure Day.

It’s disappointing. I thought Warner Bros. would at least let Dolores’s (let alone Teddy’s, poor guy) grave rest for at least five years before opening up the Westworld gates again. Sure, HBO’s Westworld lost itself in the robot sauce occasionally, but it was also a nine-time Emmy-winning series—with a stacked cast!–that was wildly prescient in its vision of artificial intelligence.

Everyone involved in Westworld deserved the chance to end the series on their terms. Nolan? Joy? Dolores? If you’re reading this, just know that I’ll never stop counting brain orbs.