Branded the saviour of cinema, Christopher Nolan’s time-travelling sci-fi turned out more of a sacrificial lamb – and has totally spooked the industry
Releasing his lowest-grossing film since 2006’s The Prestige was probably not on Christopher Nolan’s agenda for 2020, but then nobody has had exactly the year they expected. Since his big, metallic sci-fi thriller Tenet finally hit cinemas in late August – after months of delay and deliberation – its box-office figures have been the subject of as much variable debate as its tangled, time-slipping plot.
After six weeks of global release, Tenet has grossed more than £235m worldwide – a number that means different things to different analysts. For a latter-day Nolan film, it’s borderline disastrous: far short of the £405m grossed by his last film, Dunkirk, which itself was a modest performer compared to the £830m racked up by The Dark Knight Rises. With a production budget around £154m, it’s fair to say these are not the receipts of Nolan’s or Warner Bros executives’ dreams. Others would argue that they’re not half bad for a film released in the midst of a global pandemic in which the filmgoing public has been actively discouraged from communal indoor activity – a metric for which there is no precedent to set the bar. Globally, it’s the third-highest grosser of the year, behind Chinese epic The Eight Hundred and January’s Bad Boys for Life, which already feels like a relic from another era.