Ready or not, safe or healthy or not, here comes Tenet.
The triennial fruitage from the Christopher Nolan brainery represents the closest thing to a sure bet that Warners has to count on. Given that, it’s hard to imagine what sort of gun to their head it took to get the studio to send the only film they are likely to see from him until 2023, out into the half-quarantined world as a guinea pig for the cause of theater re-openings.
Not to mention a test case for the question of whether you can open theaters without effectively creating super-spreader hubs of the deadly virus.
But, as the director made clear to the WSJ, there’s more at stake here. “The movie business is about people in communities, who work jobs like selling popcorn or taking tickets. It is a massive industry made up of ordinary people.”
I’m sure John Stankey, Jason Kilar, and Ann Sarnoff are touched by their marquee auteur’s concern for “ordinary people,” and absolutely thrilled to have the opportunity to do something for the popcorn sellers.
But theirs not to question why, theirs but to do or die when it comes to heeding the whims of their leading director.
If you want to know how thrilled Warners is for the chance to do this, just take a gander down the rest of their schedule and see how many others of their surefire blockbusters they are planning to open while the world’s two biggest markets are closed down.
Once the genie of box office is out of the bottle, there’s no going back. Below is a screengrab a friend sent on Saturday night from a pirate site . . . . While Nolan saves the cinema, cell-phone captured versions of his film with Chinese subtitles were flooding the internet, ready for those who aren’t prepared to venture back to the theaters to stream and honor the cinematic experience in their own way.
It’s always been clear who is calling the shots in the Warners-Nolan relationship since a moment back at CinemaCon 2017. At that year’s gathering, then marketing honcho Sue Kroll, in what in retrospect looks like one of the few outbursts of forward-looking thinking ever to grace the convention, made a speech advocating shortening the window, telling the theater owners in an unheard of dose of truth telling. “Consumer tastes are changing and that is changing the way we’re doing business.”
The bravery of that speech was immediately followed by Nolan taking the floor and dismissing the attempt to wrench the theater owners out of their complacency with an off-hand, ““The only platform I’m interested in talking about is theatrical exhibition”—publicly setting one of the lead executives at his studio straight.
So whatever Tenet could’ve been in normal times, it will go down as a release with an asterisk. Christopher Nolan may feel he has reaffirmed his commitment to cinema, but he may well have given Telephoney Top Brass one more reason to tip the internal scales away from the headache of theatrical.
And should this film release go down as the super-spreader event of the Century, we’ll know who thought the importance of letting the world see Tenet on the big screen was something that had to happen—at any price.
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