Christopher Nolan’s Tenet: What Happened to this Movie?

Christopher Nolan has built his name up over the years to the point that he’s widley considered the greatest director or our generation. His latest film, Oppenheimer, seems bound to finally win him an elusive best director Oscar. But, in the wild build up to his latest movie, many failed to consider his last movie, Tenet, which was unusually divisive for the director. With it set for a nationwide re-release next month, now’s a good time to look back on a movie that’s winning more and more fans every year.

Tenet was born from a simple idea that came to him while making his breakout hit Memento over 20 years ago. While putting that film together, he thought of a single image that helped him crack the way in which to tell a backwards story. The image was that of a bullet being sucked out of a wall. That image stuck in his brain for years until around 2014 he finally realized that the perfect story to accompany such an image would take place in the world of spies and espionage. By that point, Nolan could do no wrong in the eyes of many. His Dark Knight trilogy reinvented the comic book genre with its grounded story telling while Inception became one of the most talked about movie endings of all time, and yes, the totem was wobbling and Leo got out! 

While writing the film, Nolan says that he steered clear from watching any films in the spy genre  as he didn’t want any of that to seep into his own story telling. Much as he did when crafting the superb space epic Interstellar, Nolan would make sure the science was correct. Although he says he wasn’t as fanatical about getting the science 100% right for Tenet as he was on Interstellar saying that for Interstellar the truthfulness of the science is why you buy into that story so completely and if anyone ever wanted to go back and track the science of that film, they could follow it to the T and it would make perfect sense. This one he could play it a little bit more loose and have the science fit the story and not the other way around. 

He used theories such as Entropy (the lack of predictability), the second law of thermodynamics (which states that as energy is transferred and transformed, more and more of it is wasted), the Grandfather Paradox (the easiest to explain, if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he has your father, how could you have ever been born to go back in time and do such a thing?) And other theories that are way above this lowly Internet Movie Writer’s head! The point is, the man puts in his work to make the films make sense!

With the script in the bag and a continued run of successful films under his belt, he would go to the studio that has been his home for over a decade, Warner Brothers who would give Nolan the biggest budget he has ever worked with: $200 Million. 

The cast would assemble fairly quick with Kenneth Branagh, who appeared in Nolan’s previous film Dunkirk, cast as the films antagonist named Sator, taken from the famous Sator Square which is latin word square featuring a five word latin palindrome. With Nolan bringing on John David Washington after being impressed with his work in Blackkklansman and Elizabeth Debicki after being impressed with her work in Widows. Robert Pattinson, who had built up quite the indie resume with films like Good Time and The Lighthouse would join the cast soon after along with Bollywood star Dimple Kapadia and Emmy Award Winner Himesh Patel (He won Lead Actor in Limited Series for Station Eleven) with other Nolan familiar faces such as Martin Donovan and Michael Caine filling out the supporting cast. Keeping with the secretive nature of the film, Washington, Debicki and Pattinson were all only permitted to read the script while locked in a room as to avoid any chance of the script leaking.

Warner Brothers would announce the first day of filming on May 22, 2019 by putting out a press release that also included the films official title for the first time: Tenet. This would send the internet into a tizzy as they tried to figure out the hidden meaning of the title with many speculating on its religious meaning while others quickly picked up on the fact that the title was a palindrome, a word that is the same both forwards and backwards. Filming would kick off on soundstages in Los Angeles before jettisoning around the globe to places like Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Norway and The United Kingdom.

With the hefty budget in place, Nolan, one of the most vocal proponents of film over digital and of practical effects over computer generated ones would bring on Hoyte Van Hoytema, whom he worked with on Interstellar and Dunkirk as his Director of Photography and together the pair would continue their work shooting on both Kodak 65mm and Imax 70mm film stock. When you hear people talking about the “frame opening up” that is what they are talking about. When you see a film that is shot with both stocks, when you see the black bars on the top and bottom, those are the more traditionally framed shots, but when the screen opens up to fill it up in its entirety, those are the 70mm Imax shots that look so amazing in big action scenes or vast aerial shots. If you ever have the opportunity to check out a movie filmed with Imax cameras at a TRUE Imax theater, not one of the AMC Imax screens, which are suitable, but not the full on experience of a TRUE Imax screen, I must insist you take it. It will be an experience you will never forget.

The production had no shortage of interesting days, like one day in India when they had 40 boats parked at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club near The Gateway of India, as the crew was wrapping for the day, a man jumped in the water in what was later revealed to be a suicide attempt. The lifeguards and other professionals were unable to get to the man, but luckily the way the water set had been designed by the crew, several crew members were able to get near the man, toss him a rope and rescue him. 

While filming in Estonia, the crew had originally wanted to shut down one of the major highways in the city of Tallinn, which is the biggest city in Estonia, for an entire month to film the big highway chase scene. The mayor of the city was not okay with that length of a shut down and had to work with the production until an agreement was reached for only temporary road closures and detours. The city would embrace the filming of this major Hollywood motion picture by sending out a casting call to its residents (see below for that picture). It all seemed to work, as when the film was eventually released, it became the highest grossing foreign film ever in Estonia with a whopping $1.2 Million!

One of the biggest set pieces to emerge from the filming of Tenet was the massive plane crash at the airport. The scene looked amazing and most who saw it in the film’s first trailer figured it to be a well done piece of computer magic. Those who thought that, truly underestimated Christopher Nolan’s desire to shoot all effects practically! Originally when he wrote the scene, Nolan did figure he would have to create the scene using a mixture of miniatures and computer generated images to get the exact look he wanted. He says he tries to avoid using CGI as much as possible because he feels the audience is smart enough to know the difference between something animated and something captured in camera. When they arrived at the airport in Victorville, California to shoot other scenes, Nolan says he, his cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and Visual Effects supervisor Andrew Jackson noticed a sort of grave yard of old 747 jets. In a moment he would later call an “impulse purchase”, Nolan and his team decided to shoot the scene where the 747 jet crashes into the Freeport, using a real live jet! They ran the numbers and had it figured that using the real live decommissioned jet would be more cost effective than shooting it using CGI and other methods.

Andrew Jackson and his visual effects team would find 747 jet brakes to add back on to the plane and the scene would be filmed by attaching tow rope to the plane and using tow trucks to pull it forward until it hit its mark to cue the pyrotechnics. Jackson says the plane did miss its mark by a few feet, but that just added to the realism of the scene. So yeah, blowing up a real airplane is cheaper than using computer generated images! The practical visual effects did pay off though when Andrew Jackson and his team would be victorious at the Academy Awards, winning the film’s sole Oscar for Best Visual Effects. 

The film would finish shooting in late 2019 and post production would begin shortly after. Nolan would reach out to his frequent collaborator Hans Zimmer to compose the score for the film, but Zimmer had to turn him down as he chose to compose the score for Dune instead, which given the fact that Zimmer would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work on Dune, it is hard to argue with his decision. Nolan would then turn to recent Academy Award Winning Black Panther composer Ludwig Göransson who would study retrograde composition which is how you make a melody sound the exact same forwards and backwards. In addition to being an Academy Award winning film composer, Goransson is also a Grammy Award winning producer who has worked with such artists as Childish Gambino, Adele and Travis Scott with whom he would collaborate with for Tenet’s closing credits song “The Plan.”

The first footage from the film was screened before the Dwayne Johnson/ Jason Statham Oscar Snubbed Fast and the Furious spin off Hobbs and Shaw with the film’s entire prologue, the opening Opera House siege, playing in Imax theaters before showings of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in late 2019. Audience reaction was swift with fans eagerly anticipating this new science fiction epic that we still knew next to nothing about! 

And then… the world changed forever.

Do you remember where you were on March 11, 2020? It was a day like any other, the sun was shining, the birds were chirping. There were rumblings and probably some particles in the wind about a virus that was quickly spreading, but life had continued to go on for most of us, unimpeded by such trivial things. And then came 9pm, March 11, 2020. The Masked Singer had just unmasked its latest celebrity (on this day it was Sarah Palin dressed in a bear costume) and as we sat on our couches enjoying a nice bowl of rainbow sorbet with a sprinkling of fruity pebbles for texture, the U.S President came on our TV’s and informed us all that this little virus we had been hearing about had now been classified as a full blown Pandemic by the World Health organization. Still, none of us really sounded the alarm. This is something out of a movie and things like that never show up on our doorsteps. We will be fine we said. A few hours later it was announced that the NBA had decided to postpone all their upcoming games indefinitely in order to protect their players and fans. Okay sure, makes sense, let’s wait and see what is going on before we proceed with anything. Good job NBA, way to play it safe and actually not think about the money over the safety for once. And then, shortly after, news broke that shook the entire world to its core: Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson got the Vid.

Shit. Just. Got. Real!

As the world dealt with a new reality, so too did the movie industry. The weekend of Mar 13-15, 2020 had a top ten box office gross of $49,580,363, the following week the cumulative box office plummeted to $4,160, the following week, down to $3,758.

Theaters would be shut down across the United States and elsewhere around the globe while everyone tried to figure out what to do. Films that were originally scheduled to hit theaters such as Bill & Ted Face The Music, Greyhound, My Spy, Trolls World Tour and Hamilton would all forgo their planned theatrical outings in favor of streaming debuts. During this time, AMC, the largest Theater Chain in the world began floating the idea that if they weren’t able to open their theaters soon, they may not be able to survive the pandemic having lost nearly $5 Billion worth of revenue in 2020 alone. What didn’t help matters was the Coronavirus seemed to have ebbs and flows. One week it would seem things were getting better and then the next week we were back to def con 5. That shifting landscape saw studios continue to dangle movie release dates in front of theaters, with none more anticipated by all involved than Tenet, which seemed to be sticking to its July 17 release having embraced the new way of filmmaking: doing everything remotely.

As some theaters reopened, they would rely on older movies to fill vacant screens while awaiting any new content to arrive that could drive those that were willing back to theaters. On June 12 came the first blow. Tenet had been pushed back by two weeks to July 31. Just a week and a half later Warner’s would announce the second delay, pushing Tenet back until August 12. By this point, Disney who had been keeping an eye on the release of Tenet as a blue print for their own epic Mulan decided to just call it a day and release their film directly to their streaming service but at an additional cost of $30. Meaning you had to first pay to subscribe to their Disney+ service and then pay an additional $30 if you wanted to watch the live action remake of Mulan. That was simply not an option for Tenet as even if this wasn’t a movie by a visionary filmmaker who champions the theatrical experience more than most other filmmakers, Tenet cost $200 million to produce with another $150 million believed to have been spent on marketing with Warner Brothers saying that each delay the film had added nearly half a million dollars in marketing. Releasing this anywhere other than theaters would have been catastrophic to their bottom line. 

On July 20, with movie theater openings still coming at a snails pace, Warner Brothers pulled Tenet from the release schedule, this time not offering up a new date only saying that a new release date would be announced “imminently.” A week later the studio would announce that Tenet would open in some international territories a week before opening in the United States on September 3. In the mean time other studios saw an opportunity to test the waters with non tent pole films. First out of the gate would the Russell Crowe starring Unhinged which would be the first film to receive a wide release on August 21, 2020 in 1,823 screens. Unhinged would gross just over $4 Million that weekend. It would be followed a week later by the long delayed X-Men film The New Mutants with just over $7 Million made in its opening weekend.

And then it happened: September 3, 2020, Labor Day Weekend, Tenet was finally released in the United States. Warner Brothers would actually hold Early Access Screenings at Imax theaters across the country from August 31 to September 2. The writer of this episode, Brad, was one such person who made it out to theaters on August 31 to see Christopher Nolan’s latest. He remembers it vividly. He had not been to a theater since way back in March. He had told himself that as long as he was cautious, he could go to the theaters just this once to see a movie he had been anticipating for over two years. He wore two masks as well as brought Clorox wipes to wipe down the seat and arm rests. At this time AMC had been blocking off seats around any seats that were occupied meaning that if you bought a seat, the seats next to you on either side and in front of you and in back of you, if applicable, were blocked off so no one else could buy those seats. Honestly, it was movie going bliss for an introverted germaphobe! At the time we were still three months away from any sort of vaccine being available, so with the very limited knowledge we had on the virus, it was very possible you were putting your own life at risk just to go to the movies. You could wear a mask, socially distance, but at the end of the day if the guy three rows behind you decides to take off his mask and sneeze, well… we all saw the scene from Outbreak!

So the movie is released, it does so-so numbers, opening to only $11.6 Million on its first official weekend, although at that point it had already took in nearly $9 Million from those early access screenings, so really it opened to around $20 Million. Although keep in mind at this time many theaters were not open including every one in New York and Los Angeles which are the two biggest markets in the United States. Tenet would remain atop the box office for five straight weeks before being taken down by Robert DeNiro in: The War With Grandpa!

Reviews for the film hailed the film as a visual treat with the type of mind bending story telling you expected from Nolan, however others would just find the film confusing and convoluted. But the biggest problem the average movie goer had with the film was that you just couldn’t hear anything! The sound mix was so robust that almost all of the dialog was inaudible in most theaters. This is not a new complaint for Nolan’s films as many had a hard time understanding what Bane was saying in The Dark Knight Rises as well as similar complaints for Interstellar and Dunkirk. One critic even noted in his review that for a film like Tenet that is supposed to show audiences that theatrical moviegoing is worth saving, it will probably play better on Blu ray with the subtitles turned on. Nolan would respond to these sound complaints by saying that he and his sound team decided long ago that they were not going to mix these films for substandard theaters. They are mixing for well-aligned, great theaters that keep up to date with the latest sound equipment. He also notes that often times the dialog is just one piece of the experience, saying that sometimes the dialog is only there as a sound effect that emphasizes the surrounding noises.

In the US the film would peter out with just $58.5 Million while international audiences would propel it higher with $306.9 Million for a worldwide total of $365.2 Million. Given the film’s high production budget and marketing costs many predicted the film would need to hit at the very least $500 Million to even be considered a a moderate success. 

The gamble and constant push to get Tenet to theaters as fast as possible was not the theatrical savior it was meant to be.

The entire industry looked at this and were now more cautious than ever with their upcoming slate of films. Warner Brothers would announce their next big tent pole film, Wonder Woman 1984, would release day and date in theaters and on HBO Max. They would then announce that their entire 2021 slate of films, everything from Mortal Kombat to Godzilla vs Kong to Dune, would follow the Wonder Woman strategy and release day and date in theaters and on HBO Max. This was an unprecedented move by the studio and one that did not sit right with Christopher Nolan. When asked about it, Nolan did not mince words saying that he was in disbelief that the studio would do that without telling any of the people involved in the affected films. He called it a bait and switch with the studio using these people’s work as a loss leader for their fledgling streaming service. The most biting comment came when he said “some of our biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.” In a weird way, Christopher Nolan and the release of Tenet directly led to the rise of streaming in the pandemic era. It is something that is still going on today as the recently released Halloween Ends saw its box office diminished when Universal decided to open it day and date on their own fledgling streaming service Peacock.

Nolan points out that the release of Tenet was not nearly the fumble it was perceived to be. He says that the studios were just drawing the wrong conclusions. They were so focused on where the film underperformed that they failed to look at the fact that in the areas where the Pandemic was handled correctly and the public felt safe going to theaters, the film was a massive hit like any other blockbuster, but in the areas where the virus was most out of control and not handled in the best way, that is where the film failed to find an audience and they panicked. However, not all of Tenet’s issues can be chalked up to COVID, with the film’s sound mix bitterly divisive among fans.

Of course Nolan was right and movie theaters made a comeback. Films like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Top Gun: Maverick helped bring theaters back from the brink, and Nolan’s own Oppeneheimer made close to a billion dollars worldwide just this year. It just seems that Warner Brothers and maybe even Christopher Nolan got so enamored with being THE movie that saved the movie going experience that they didn’t think to just wait it out a little bit longer. Of course hindsight is 20/20 and we can see that had they just waited a year, Tenet would have played the way it was always meant to, even more so given that extra year of anticipation, but somebody had to be the test subject, and Tenet was that guinea pig.

However, time heals all wounds, and Nolan has since buried the hatched with the studio. And who knows – maybe he’ll even do his next movie for the studio. Stranger things have happened.