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Christopher Nolan “Thrilled” With ‘Tenet’ Box Office Performance: “Everybody Has To Adapt To A New Reality”

Alexandra Del Rosario
·2 min read

Tenet hit theaters back in September, but Christopher Nolan finally has broken his silence on the action film’s pandemic performance.

“Warner Bros. released Tenet, and I’m thrilled that it has made almost $350 million,” he told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Tuesday.

Tenet, which stars John David Washington and Robert Pattinson, gets a full chapter in British film critic Tom Shone’s latest book The Nolan Variations. During the interview, Shone and Nolan spoke with the Times about the themes in the filmmaker’s works, the discourse surrounding his mind-bending titles and more.

While Nolan expressed pleasure with Tenet‘s box office numbers, he told the Times that he’s afraid major studios might be taking home the wrong message from the picture’s pandemic-age performance.

“Rather than looking at where the film has worked well and how that can provide them with much needed revenue, they’re looking at where it hasn’t lived up to pre-COVID expectations and will start using that as an excuse to make exhibition take all the losses from the pandemic instead of getting in the game and adapting — or rebuilding our business, in other words,” he added.

He continues to urge the industry and audiences to consider the importance of exhibition and the moviegoing experience as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect box office releases and shutter local theaters. Back in March, Nolan penned an op-ed in the Washington Post wherein he dubbed movie theaters “a vital part of social life” worth preserving. In his latest interview, Nolan maintains that perspective.

“Long term, moviegoing is a part of life, like restaurants and everything else,” he said. “But right now, everybody has to adapt to a new reality.”

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