Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr are reportedly in talks to join Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan's next film "Oppenheimer" at Universal Pictures.

Universal is calling the movie an "epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it."

Murphy is portraying the theoretical physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb during World War II. According to sources, Blunt is playing his wife, Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer, while Damon will play Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. research initiative that developed the first atomic bomb.

Downey will play Lewis Strauss, the infamous chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who initiated hearings that questioned Oppenheimer's loyalty to the United States and famously had the scientist’s security clearance revoked.

Nolan wrote the script and is directing, while his creative partner and wife, Emma Thomas, is producing with Charles Roven of Atlas Entertainment. The project is based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. Published in 2005, the book won the Pulitzer Prize.

Christopher Nolan's last film, Tenet, was released via Warner Bros., but the filmmaker has since moved on from the studio and will be releasing Oppenheimer through Universal. Nolan was vocal about being upset with the day-and-date release model implemented by Warner Bros. during the pandemic, a model that will continue through the end of the year. Even though Tenet was released theatrically, the filmmaker decided to pull up the stakes and move to another studio for his next effort, which ends a long run with the studio that produced The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and his latest, Tenet.

Source: Press Release