UKC

In the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/oct/06/tenet-didnt-just-fail-to-save-...

I haven't seen the film but from the Internet chatter about it, I would broadly agree with this article, given that there were more obviously attractive and familiar "tentpole" films that surely would have drawn more people out (which is what the cinemas wanted/needed). Examples in the article. 


 

"Was the general public simply not ready to go to the movies? Or was Tenet specifically not the film to lure them back?"

... "It’s quite possible, then, that Tenet would have been an overhyped underperformer even in a non-Covid summer movie season"

Let's see. Tenet is a high-concept, big budget, original sci-fi not based on any existing popular source material. The most recent example of something similar, is Jupiter Ascending (Warner Brothers again) whose failure (worldwide $184 million off a $176 million prodution budget not including marketing etc) somewhat stifled the Wachowskis' careers for a while.

(in fairness, Looper did very well from a $30 million budget and for most people including me, not knowing the source material, Edge of Tomorrow was "original" and that made a lot of money, so maybe my point is moot, but the marketing on those two made them look like the fairly watchable things that they turned out to be, whereas the elliptical ambiguous marketing on Tenet just didn't come across as attractive...)

IMHO the Guardian article gets it right, i.e. "Tenet" was just not the easy, no-brainer, choice for a big movie to get the crowds back in. Too high-concept, not based on existing material, and not a franchise. And the word of mouth can't have helped. I think I'm an intelligent bloke, used to concept movies (and indeed love them), but I had to watch several YouTube explanations of how the `time travel' elements worked to actually figure them out. And despite Chris Nolan's claim that you didn't need to get your head round the concepts and could just `go with it' as a `spy' movie, you did. The terrible sound mix, obscuring several bouts of on-screen exposition, also didn't help...

`No Time To Die' would've been the obvious choice, but understandable that Eon did not want to be the guinea pig. However, it's all a bit of a mess at the moment because whilst it may be understandable not to want to chuck your movie away if no-one's going, if they all get held back then we're going to get to stage next year when half the business (e.g. Cineworld etc) will have just gone. Guess `Dune' is going to be the next one to get moved into 2012. Grrrrr.

Dune has been pushed to October 2021. By "2012" did you mean "2022" or "2021"? 

Your comments on Tenet echo a lot of what I've read but I didn't want to say too much because, as I say, I have not actually seen it (to be honest even before release and reviews, I got that impression anyway from the trailer and from Nolan's previous "Interstellar")

Well, they said early widespread home television (in the 1950s-60s) would kill cinema. Then video in the 1980s. Then immersive computer games in the mid-1990s. Then television again (in the initial form of "Home Cinema", late 1990s-early-00s). Then more detailed immersive computer games. Then television again (with streaming content and the massive improvement in quality of television shows). 

And yet it may turn out that a virus will do it.