Headlines on entertainment websites over the summer were mostly dominated by what Warner Bros. planned to do with Tenet, the latest sci-fi blockbuster from The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan. It quickly became apparent that the filmmaker was intent on his movie being the one to "save" theaters, and he continued to push for the preservation of that big screen experience...not letting a little thing like a global pandemic slow him down.
Despite it being deemed unsafe to sit in a theater at the time, Nolan was relentless, even when COVID-19 cases and deaths were on the rise across the entire globe.
Warner Bros. appeared to push back against the director, ultimately delaying Tenet to September. There, the movie pretty much crashed and burned, grossing only $357 million at the global box office on a $205 million budget. Even worse, a mere $57.6 million of that came from North America, and that's not something studio bosses can easily overlook. With that, there was something of a paradigm shift in Hollywood as execs realised that releasing a movie in the current landscape would be a total disaster. We then watched as every major upcoming blockbuster was pushed into 2021, making life even harder for theaters than it already had been.
Now, they'll be lucky to survive as we head into the New Year, and while it would be silly to say that every theater on the planet will have closed their doors by this time next year, it's pretty obvious that the film industry is never going to be the same.
Following the news about Warner Bros.' entire 2021 slate debuting in theaters and on HBO Max on the same day, Nolan is going on the offensive, saying: "Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service."
Those are fighting words, and it feels like Nolan's relationship with Warner Bros. could soon come to an end. Why does Nolan seem intent on depriving people of being able to choose how they watch movies? We don't know, but he has a role to play in HBO Max being used the way it is next year.
Simply put, had Nolan not pushed for Tenet to be released when it was, there's a very good chance this decision would have never been made. Warner Bros. is clearly concerned about a string of box office disappointments in 2021, and while execs at the studio would have no doubt reached a similar conclusion one way or the other, Nolan's impatience and borderline fanatic desire to "save" theaters was a major contributing factor. It's also worth noting that it's been reported that the director was to receive 20% of the first dollar gross on Tenet, so he had more than one reason to want it to be the first movie playing in theaters (rather than it being delayed again or released on Digital).
There's a chance Tenet would have underperformed even in a world without COVID, but Nolan's push for his movie to be released the way it was may have, ironically, sped up the decline of people going to their local theater. Saving the jobs of those who work in that industry is incredibly important, but Nolan never stopped to wonder whether they wanted to be put at risk serving the public in a non-essential job just so cinephiles could brag about watching a movie on an IMAX screen.
Warner Bros. hasn't handled the HBO Max decision as well as they probably should have, but rather than laying the blame at his (former?) employer's door, Nolan might just want to look a little closer to home. Either way, he's made it abundantly clear that he's horribly out of touch.