‘Tenet’s’ Box Office Has Only Gotten Worse in its Third Week
By George Robbins
Movie theaters are just having a terrible go of things as time currently goes on and it doesn’t seem like it will be getting any better in the near future. Back in mid-March of this year, movie theaters, like most other businesses were forced to shut down in order to adjust to the pandemic. This meant that for months, they have not been able to bring in any kind of income and they still had to maintain their businesses for when they actually got their doors open again. Within recent weeks, they were actually given this grand opportunity and for the first week everything looked great. Then the inevitable thing called time happened and it has been miserable ever since.
Theaters have not exactly been given a wide selection of films in order to keep people entertained with the biggest one being the movie ‘Tenet.’ Director Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. were banking heavily on this film being the one that would “save” the box office once theaters chose to once again open their doors. When the movie first released, it did so internationally and then one week later it had a domestic release. During its opening weeks, the movie actually fared better than expected and it brought in over $150 million. This gave theaters and studios confidence that maybe they were right and it was time to reopen their doors and show new films.
This was pretty much immediately proven to be incorrect as the following weekend, the big blockbuster that is ‘Tenet’ only brought in around $6.7 million nation-wide. This past weekend was even worse and it shows that this downward trend isn’t one that seems to be going away any time soon. This time the movie only brought in a total of $4.7 million which just goes to show that the trend was not just a one off show of bad luck. To put into perspective just how bad this is, the movie apparently needs something close to $500 million before marketing costs to break even. Warner may have ended up biting off way more than they could chew when they agreed to a full theatrical release for the film.