What 'Tenet' Taught Us About Moviegoing During a Pandemic

Image via Warner Bros.

Not only is this a key tenant (pun intended) of business strategy, but a limiting factor in the movie’s overall performance. There’s a reason independent movies, like those seen from A24, typically hit New York City and Los Angeles in the first weekend of release: they’re the two largest movie markets in the country. Theaters in those two cities are still closed and look to be for the foreseeable future. Releasing a new movie into the wild, without those markets there for support, places you with an uphill battle from the get-go before you bring the ‘rona of it all into the equation.

Before you consider the fact that indoor spaces are higher-risk for transmission of COVID than outdoor spaces, chains themselves are essentially operating with one hand tied behind their back. Reduced seating capacity widely varies depending on the city, essentially hard-capping the revenue that Tenet could garner.

Assuming all things were equal to, let’s say, Dunkirk’s opening weekend’s performance, the maximum Warner Bros. could have seen from Tenet with a 50% capacity, was $25 million opening weekend. That’s not bad for a pandemic, but it’s certainly not what you want if you’re used to seeing Nolan films be huge cash cows.

Global returns, however, have been a bit more generous. According to Deadline, this past weekend, the Japanese market opened Tenet, boosting the worldwide gross to about $250 million. That’s still a drop in the bucket relative to past Nolan flicks’ performance and makes it so the movie has narrowly made back its production budget of $205 million.

While conventional wisdom would lead you to believe we might start to see diminishing financial returns, the pandemic is working in Tenet’s favor here. After Disney pushed the release of Black Widow to 2021, the next major release is No Time to Die on November 20, which means there’s plenty of time for the movie to hang around in theaters and drum up funds for Warner Bros. should it continue to play theaters between now and then. After No Time to Die, the only other major release we’re seeing in 2020 will be Dune on December 18. Considering that experts anticipate COVID will worsen as the season transitions, I’m not sure those dates will hold. That doesn’t even take into account Disney doing something along the lines of Mulan and just sending future releases to Disney+ Premier Access.

The financial reality surrounding Tenet, not unlike the events of the movie itself, verges on paradoxical. Studios need money to continue to make and release films. Movie theater chains need movies to screen to survive. Hardcore moviegoers want to see a movie in a theater, the way it was meant to be seen, but not in a way that risks their health and safety. Sure, PVOD can help studios make money, but it’s not a foolproof solution. There’s no right or wrong answer. Instead, it’s a vicious circle—one with no great solution that benefits everyone. Not unlike Tenet, this whole box office situation is something we’re all just having to feel our way through.