Chris Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ will open in 70 overseas territories on August 26, with a limited Labor Day weekend debut in America.
Chris Nolan’s Tenet will open in 70 overseas territories on August 26, with a limited Labor Day weekend debut in America. Well, that’s one mystery solved. Warner Bros. announced at 10:00 am this morning that Chris Nolan’s Tenet would be opening in 70 overseas territories, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Spain, and the UK. Moreover the John David Washington/Robert Pattinson time-inversion thriller will play in America in a limited theatrical capacity in select cities beginning on Labor Day weekend. Needless to say, this is highly unusual for a film of this size and scale, but then these are unusual circumstances. Warner Bros. initially dated the film for July 17, 2020 and held firm on that date until they had no choice but to move first to July 31 and then to August 12. Oh, and the Inception reissue will debut on August 21. The hope was that movie theaters would be up-and-running by early July and that Tenet would be the first biggie to welcome them back. And back when everything closed down in mid-March, that didn’t seem like the craziest proposition. Of course, things aren’t getting better, and with fourteen MLB players and staff testing positive for covid, the baseball season may have been ended before it’s barely begun. That makes the idea of opening a big movie in North America, even in limited release (theater count to be determined), a risky proposition, but it’s also turning theatrical cinema into essentially the cookie we don’t get because we failed to contain the virus. Hey, at least Tenet gets to be the first big movie after the lockdown after all. Beyond that, there’s only speculation in terms of how the film will play overseas and how it will play in the few(er) theaters in which it is shown in North America. I am assuming that it will play in every IMAX theater in which it is declared (by the respective state’s government) as able to do so, as well as related PLF auditoriums.
