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Two summers ago, on a sweltering day in June, I interviewed<\/a> Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan at their Manhattan apartment. I was there to talk about their then-new Prime Video series, Fallout<\/em><\/a>, but any pandemic-times Esquire reader knew what I was really<\/em> there for: Westworld<\/em>.<\/p>\n Also created by Joy and Nolan, Westworld<\/em>\u2014based on the 1973 sci-fi western written by Michael Crichton\u2014ran for four wonderful, chaotic, and very often senseless (which I say lovingly!) seasons on HBO. Then the network cancelled the series in 2022<\/a>, before any of its increasingly convoluted storylines could actually pay off. It felt like Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright, Tessa Thompson<\/a>, and James Marsden<\/a> 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 <\/em>from its streaming platform.<\/p>\n I asked Nolan and Joy if they ever had Westworld<\/em>‘s endgame in mind and they lit up. \u201cIt was always going to be a story in which these immortal characters would change and we\u2019d find them in very different circumstances,\u201d Nolan said. Joy added, \u201cWe always had a plan on where to go with it. Time is a gift. Our ideas will change and grow. I\u2019m curious to see when it happens\u2014if it happens\u2014how it\u2019s changed, or how it\u2019s evolved.\u201d<\/p>\n When it happens? <\/em>Their words gave me hope that Westworld <\/em>would return from the Valley Beyond someday\u2014until yesterday’s news. Deadline <\/em>reported<\/a> that screenwriter David Koepp (who wrote the scripts for Jurassic Park <\/em>and two of its sequels) will pen a Westworld <\/em>film for Warner Bros. Not only that, but “a major filmmaker is circling” the project. Some already think<\/a> 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<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Westworld<\/em> lost itself in the robot sauce occasionally, but it was also a nine-time Emmy-winning series\u2014with a stacked cast!\u2013that was wildly prescient in its vision of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n