It’s easy to see why The Prisoner might appeal to Nolan. Its themes of the individual vs. an imposing bureaucracy, life in a surveillance state, physical and temporal dislocation, and the loss of identity are all ideas that the director has touched on in previous works, ranging from Memento (2000) to the Dark Knight trilogy to Inception (2010) to Tenet (2020). The show’s surreal mix of dystopian science fiction, existential mystery, and spy drama – one popular fan theory suggests that Number Six is actually secret agent John Drake, the protagonist of McGoohan’s earlier series, Danger Man – are all right in the filmmaker’s wheelhouse, albeit in a combination that he hasn’t yet created in his work to date.
Interestingly, The Prisoner was on Nolan’s radar once before: in 2009, between the release of The Dark Knight the year before and Inception in 2010, it was widely reported that the filmmaker was working on a big-screen remake. He allegedly abandoned it after news surfaced that a six-part AMC miniseries was in the works (that version, starring Jim Caviezel as Number Six and Ian McKellen as Number Two, aired in November 2009 and was a tedious, incoherent disaster). Typically, Nolan has said little about his own attempt to tackle The Prisoner, only telling Variety in 2023 that he “couldn’t quite crack” the adaptation.
Could Remaking The Prisoner Be a Trap?
With its themes of individual liberty and anti-establishment resistance, not to mention its English holiday resort setting and colorful, even psychedelic imagery, The Prisoner was very much a product of its time – the late ‘60s – and might be tough to adapt in a modern version for that very reason. The 2009 remake traded all that, even the production design, for a more bland, sterilized look at identity politics that, as typical these days, offered up lame “mystery box” answers for its many initial enigmas.
Yet the elements that make The Prisoner so unique and retro-futuristic are also the aspects that Nolan could manipulate to his own advantage. It was formally experimental for its time, and anyone who has seen most of Nolan’s filmography, especially films like Inception, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer, knows he has no problem with that, nor with surrealism. And while his movies have to date largely worked within a more muted visual palate, adapting the colorful, kaleidoscopic mise en scène of The Prisoner to a modern blockbuster could be the kind of challenge that this filmmaker likes to set for himself.
At this point, The Prisoner has kind of faded in the public zeitgeist, as newer generations have never seen the original and perhaps only fleetingly heard of it. That also gives Nolan the opportunity to stretch the premise and material in whatever direction he sees fit, without having to worry about alienating vast hordes of fans ready to pounce on social media if he gets the cut of Number Six’s jacket wrong. Yet at the same time, the basic scenario is so strong and so bizarre that Nolan might hesitate to lose sight of what made the original show so compelling. But seeing that its themes and mix of genres are so prevalent in his work already, we imagine that he’s perhaps the one director who could pull this off.
With the enormous, unprecedented success of Oppenheimer giving Nolan more creative freedom than perhaps ever before for a mainstream, big-budget filmmaker, should Nolan remake a semi-forgotten, 60-year-old TV show – or dive headfirst into the James Bond franchise, another long-rumored possibility – or use the leverage he’s got now to make something completely new and original? In the corporate echelons of Hollywood, Nolan is now perhaps the only director who can shout Number Six’s most famous line – “I am not a number, I am a free man!” – and mean it.
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