Christopher Nolan Feels That Studios Are Taking All of The Wrong Conclusions From ‘Tenet’
By George Robbins
The film industry as a whole has been trying to figure out how they should be moving forward during this pandemic and it has only become more challenging as time has gone on. Movie studios focus most of their time and effort into making sure that movies get produced in a timely fashion and then they get released straight to theaters. With theaters being mostly out of commission when the pandemic began and rules being put in place to prevent businesses from opening, studios immediately ran into trouble. This trouble ended up being worse than they could have imagined and now we are starting to see a drastic decline in movie theaters as a whole. By the end of this year alone, AMC will have almost completely run out of money and there is nothing that can help them get out of that hole they are in.
Just recently, it was revealed that AMC theaters are down over 90% in overall revenue since last year due to this pandemic which means that they are getting closer and closer to bankruptcy. The new guidelines that have been put into place which they must follow are nothing but difficult for them to work around. The rules they have been forced to follow just to open up their doors to the public revolve around them not being able to allow too many people through their doors at once. Thus, they were in trouble before they were even given the opportunity to host new movies for the public to come in and see. Theaters are a business which rely solely upon bringing people in and selling out large numbers of seats for them to make their revenue and that just hasn’t been possible.
Once the pandemic began, movie theaters immediately started trying to come up with dates as to when they would reopen their doors, but they were limited by government rules. There had to be proper measures in place for them to be able to reopen their doors with permission from the government and it took longer for theaters than most other types of business. Businesses which normally had higher population counts were forced to stay closed for a longer period of time so that people could start acclimating to the new environments more easily. This eventually resulted in theaters being given permission to reopen their doors, but they had no new product to draw people in with. Without any new movies to show, theaters just sat there with their doors shut trying to wait until new movies were launched by studios.
The problem while waiting for new movies was that studios were unsure if it would even be safe to try and release new movies even if they had permission. This problem was obviously one that could not be overlooked and many studios just decided to further delay their films and wait for a new release date. One studio decided to try their hand at releasing a film right now and that was Warner Bros. who decided that it was a good time to try. Therefore, they ended up releasing their new movie ‘Tenet‘ to theaters; first in the international market and later in the domestic market. With this movie’s release they were hoping, like director Christopher Nolan, that this movie would be the one to save theaters and bring them back into the public eye.
Unfortunately for both the studios and movie theaters alike, their plan to get people back out into theaters just didn’t work as intended. While ‘Tenet’ had a strong launch in the first weeks due to it being the first pandemic release, it died out harshly domestically over the following weeks. While the movie has now managed to rake in approximately $350 million worldwide, only $53 million has come from the domestic marketplace. While this might sound great, they actually needed to make a total of $500 million just to try and break even before counting in marketing costs for the film. When studios saw this, they immediately decided that it was really not worth trying to deal with releasing their movies at the moment and they delayed their films.
In choosing not to release their upcoming films this year, the line-up of blockbusters for this year has essentially been cleansed and no one knows how this will play out. The aforementioned issues theaters are facing has only gotten worse now and ‘Tenet’s’ director, Christopher Nolan, believes studios are making a mistake. Nolan has been nothing but a strong advocate for the movie-going experience over the years and this recent film outing of his was no different. He wanted his film to be released to theaters as soon as they possibly could and he wanted people to be able to go out and watch the film the same way they always did. That being said, when things didn’t work out as intended and studios pulled their upcoming films, Nolan became a bit upset.
Nolan believes that studios made the wrong choice when they decided to move their movie rosters around and that their reactions are not in line with how they should be doing things. He thinks that instead of thinking about things pre-pandemic aren’t helping and that studios should try and figure out how to make theatrical releases work instead of waiting things out. Needless to say, Nolan thinks that studios should be looking at other solutions to help theaters rather than just trying to wait things out. Despite the various reasons for why it is not safe for people to go out to theaters, it makes sense that he would be saying this. If things aren’t done differently, then we could see movie theaters steadily start shutting down permanently.
With Nolan’s comment about studios putting in more effort to try and figure out alternative solutions, we can see that he wants theaters to get back on top of their game. This is something that cannot be done on their own and they need help from movie studios otherwise they will have nothing to bring people in. Without movie theaters, studios will be missing out on numerous money-making opportunities in the future so it is only natural that they should try and find solutions to help them. They will need to rely almost solely on movie studios because there is nothing else that they can really do. It is unlikely that we will see anything done to help studios, but it is nice to see that someone cares about the way the industry is handling things.