June 12, 2020: Tenet gets a new release date: July 31. For months, Warner Bros. held firm to July 17, even as its competition scattered in the face of the pandemic. It seems as if Nolan intends to save theaters all by himself, if he has to.
June 18, 2020: Hey, what’s this movie even about? In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Nolan finally reveals some details, sort of: “This film is not a time-travel film. It deals with time and the different ways in which time can function. Not to get into a physics lesson, but inversion is this idea of material that has had its entropy inverted, so it’s running backwards through time, relative to us.”
June 26, 2020: Tenet gets a newer release date: August 12. “Warner Bros. is committed to bringing Tenet to audiences in theaters, on the big screen, when exhibitors are ready and public health officials say it’s time,” the studio said in a statement.
July 20, 2020: Tenet has no release date. After moving the film multiple times, Warner Bros. takes a breath to assess the situation. “We will share a new 2020 release date imminently for Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s wholly original and mind-blowing feature,” said chairman Toby Emmerich in a statement. “We are not treating Tenet like a traditional global day-and-date release, and our upcoming marketing and distribution plans will reflect that.”
July 27, 2020: Tenet gets its final, this-time-we-mean-it release date: September 3. If Nolan’s films have taught viewers anything, it’s that the nature of time itself is flexible and often irrelevant. Warner Bros. will release the movie in other, potentially safer, countries on August 26.
August 5, 2020: Warner Bros. will only screen Tenet for critics in states where theaters are allowed to operate, which does not include New York or California.
August 18, 2020: The A.V. Club asks doctors whether going to the movies is safe. “Short of renting out an entire theater, which is obviously not an option for most of us, there is no scenario in which going to a movie theater is a good idea,” says Dr. Anne W. Rimoin, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Another epidemiologist, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, puts it this way: “It’s just about the last thing I’d do right now.”
August 21, 2020: Days before its release overseas, the first wave of reviews for Tenet arrive. While the film has a strong 85% aggregate rating on Rotten Tomatoes, critics are split on whether the movie really succeeds. In a scathing review for The Guardian, Catherine Shoard says that Tenet is not worth braving a theater in the midst of a pandemic: “I’m not even sure that, in five years’ time, it’d be worth staying up to catch on telly.” However, her colleague Peter Bradshaw writes a five-star review for the same publication: “It shouldn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense. What it makes is amazing cinema. Wow.”
August 25, 2020: With U.S. theaters open in all but six states, critics here grapple with the morality of reviewing films when sitting in movie theaters remains a risk. But Tom Cruise, reporting from London, is stoked: “It is great to be back in a movie theater, everybody,” he says in a video he posted to social media after attending a special screening of Tenet in London. “I loved it. I loved it.”
September 2, 2020: Tenet will be released in many theaters nationwide tomorrow. Or perhaps, appropriate of the palindrome of the film’s title, time will invert itself back to January 25, 2019, when it was first announced, and we’ll have to do this all over again.
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