Runtime for Tenet is longer than Inception, shorter than The Dark Knight

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Christopher Nolan's new film TENET was originally supposed to reach theatres this Friday, July 17th. Due to the ongoing pandemic, it has been delayed twice – first to July 31st, then to August 12th. Even though every delay costs Warner Bros. somewhere in range of $200,000 to $400,000 because of marketing fees, the studio may have to push it back again, since virus cases are surging and some areas are going back into lockdown mode. So it's not yet certain when we'll have the chance to see this movie. But now we do know exactly how long the movie is.

The Korea Media Ratings Board has listed TENET's runtime as 149 minutes and 59 seconds.

That runtime, which we'll round up to 150 minutes, lands the film right in between INCEPTION and THE DARK KNIGHT. The runtimes for Nolan's previous feature films have been: 

FOLLOWING – 69 minutes
MEMENTO – 113 minutes
INSOMNIA – 118 minutes 
BATMAN BEGINS – 140 minutes 
THE PRESTIGE – 130 minutes 
THE DARK KNIGHT – 152 minutes
INCEPTION – 148 minutes
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES – 164 minutes
INTERSTELLAR – 169 minutes
DUNKIRK – 106 minutes

TENET is "an action epic evolving from the world of international espionage" and has the following synopsis: 

John David Washington is the new Protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s original sci-fi action spectacle “Tenet.” Armed with only one word—Tenet—and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. Not time travel. Inversion.

Nolan has said that the concept of time inversion is "inspired by real-life physics and entropy, a measure of disorder and randomness in thermodynamic systems." "Inversion is this idea of material that has had its entropy inverted, so it's running backwards through time, relative to us."

John David Washington's Protagonist is an operative for an organization called Tenet, but is said to have a "very warm emotional accessibility". He is joined in the cast by Robert Pattison as Neil, "slightly rascally character who operates within what they refer to as this twilight world of operatives in different secret services"; Kenneth Branagh as an Russian oligarch who is "unremittingly dark" and "a pitiless, avaricious, mean, desperate, terrifyingly dangerous individual"; Elizabeth Debicki as a character who develops an "ambiguous and complicated" relationship with Protagonist and happens to be the estranged wife of Branagh's character; and a "completely unrecognizable" Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

Nolan produced the film with Emma Thomas. The cast also includes Dimple Kapadia, Clémence Poésy, Michael Caine, Himesh Patel, Martin Donovan, and Denzil Smith.