Rival studios upset that Warner Bros. isn’t sharing Tenet box office data

TENET crossed $200 million at the global box office over the weekend, despite slipping a massive 66.8% in its second weekend to $6.7 million. Even though it looks like there is transparency in the box office reporting, rival studios are noticing that Warner Bros. isn't being completely upfront in regards to the data and they are not happy about it.

Since TENET premiered, Warner Bros. has parceled out carefully selected breadcrumbs of data to reporters and rival studios. Traditionally, studios share box office information on a daily basis but this hasn't been the case with TENET. Although TENET opened on September 3, Warner Bros. waited until Sunday, September 6 to officially announce opening weekend grosses and there was no reporting of its Friday numbers on Saturday which is usually the case in a traditional box office climate.

Apparently, Warner Bros. was concerned that reporters and rivals would misinterpret or unfairly analyze the results & spread headlines that TENET flopped on its opening weekend. Warner Bros. urged journalists to provide context by noting that ticket sales would automatically be lower than normal given the fact that theaters in major markets like New York and Los Angeles aren’t open and cinemas that have reopened have done so at reduced capacity.

Rival studios are closely watching TENET as a test to see if people would go to the movies during the pandemic & this is why they want Warner Bros. to be upfront with the results for the film because they need to use it as a gage for their tentpole releases that are on deck. Rival studios want TENET to succeed but insiders say given the importance of the movie theater business, Hollywood executives at other studios have privately complained about the lack of transparency, particularly not reporting daily grosses for the film.

Essentially not having access to box office hourlies in real-time prevents distribution executives from doing their job and providing their filmmakers and top executives with the health or lack thereof in the marketplace. If they can’t drill down and see how theaters in Chicago or Detroit are doing, how can they decide whether it’s good or bad to release a movie right now? A part of that uncertainty is likely why WONDER WOMAN 1984 recently shifted off its October release to Christmas Day. Warner Bros., the studio that also released TENET, likely saw the risk of releasing an expensive tentpole when some of these big markets aren't in play and decided they didn't want to gamble on releasing the DC Comics' sequel until these larger markets reopened. 

In normal times, executives that are involved in distributing films get access to grosses by the hour. Studios work with the research company Rentrak and its parent corporation Comscore to report daily numbers and publish box office charts each weekend. According to "Variety", Rentrak had to get permission from major studio heads before concealing daily numbers for TENET. They did it on opening weekend as a courtesy since it is unprecedented to release a film of this size in this climate but now studios are worried this will be a habit & other studios might start concealing numbers as well and that is something they don't want. Sony Pictures pulled a similar move with THE BROKEN HEARTS GALLERY and decided to shield its daily performance and this is the very thing other studios are afraid of.

Do YOU think Warner Bros. and other studios should be more transparent about how their movies are actually performing?