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TENET Bombs in the US (Only Made $12 Million) Hollywood in Panic

ManaByte

ManaByte

Gold Member
deadline.com

Warner Bros & Sony Hiding Box Office Numbers From Rival Studios On ‘Tenet’ & ‘Broken Hearts Gallery’: Here’s Why

Warner Bros. & Sony Hiding Box Office From Rival Studios On 'Tenet' & 'Broken Hearts Gallery': Here's Why
deadline.com deadline.com

We, the press and rival studios, are still in the dark on the daily breakdown on Tenet. Sources, who have pulled intel from exhibition, believe the $20.2M 11-day domestic breakdown of the Nolan film was as follows=$2.5M for the first weekend in Canada, $11.2M for the 3-day, around $12M for the 4-day and the rest in previews. We’ll come back to all of this in a moment.
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WB is hiding the box office numbers for TENET and the reason is that it bombed big time in the US due to theaters not being open. That's why WB pushed WW84 another two months.
 
Davey Cakes

Davey Cakes

Member
Hollywood is in denial. We're in the age of entertainment being at your fingertips, and the pandemic isn't over.

People will pay $20-$30 to watch at home. It's the model that fits the moment. Sorry that we can't just will everything back to the way it was a year ago.
 
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ManaByte

ManaByte

Gold Member
Davey Cakes said:
Hollywood is in denial. We're in the age of entertainment being at your fingertips, and the pandemic isn't over.
Click to expand...

I think most movie studios secretly would rather release their movies on their direct to consumer streaming services. If WB releases TENET on HBO Max for $20-$30, they keep 100% of that $20-$30. Theaters take 50%. Every penny of the $30 Disney makes on the Disney+ Mulan goes to them.

The problem is the National Organization of Theater Owners, which is basically the mafia and the studios are terrified of pissing them off.
 
Grinchy

Grinchy

Banned
I mean, I almost went and saw it. But then I realized I didn't feel like dealing with the weird seating restrictions or even going to the dirty theater in the first place. I don't want to spend $13 on a "reduced price" ticket and then $10 on popcorn to find myself wishing I had just bought the bluray instead.
 
mango drank

mango drank

Member
Davey Cakes said:
Hollywood is in denial. We're in the age of entertainment being at your fingertips, and the pandemic isn't over.

People will pay $20-$30 to watch at home. It's the model that fits the moment. Sorry that we can't just will everything back to the way it was a year ago.
Click to expand...
If people get used to day 1 releases at home, once the pandemic is over, how do you put that genie back into the bottle?

65" TVs are the most common size being sold these days iirc, so lots of people basically have mini movie theaters in their livingrooms already.

I guess going to a theater could still be a social "going out" experience, like going to a live concert. So it'll still have some draw. I bet movie theaters are going to have to come up with all sorts of new upgrades to get people to show up.
 
kunonabi

kunonabi

Member
I want to go back to the movies more than anyone but it's just way too soon. DIgital releases are the way to go but with how ridiculous Hollywood budgets are they're probably going to lose money regardless on the super big blockbusters.
 
Davey Cakes

Davey Cakes

Member
brohmbel said:
I guess going to a theater could still be a social "going out" experience, like going to a live concert. So it'll still have some draw. I bet movie theaters are going to have to come up with all sorts of new upgrades to get people to show up.
Click to expand...
3D movies and pricing have to go away. We need to return to $10-$12 per ticket for a purely digital picture.
 
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ManaByte

ManaByte

Gold Member
kunonabi said:
I want to go back to the movies more than anyone but it's just way too soon. DIgital releases are the way to go but with how ridiculous Hollywood budgets are they're probably going to lose money regardless on the super big blockbusters.
Click to expand...

Not really. On digital releases they make MORE money than they do releasing in theaters.

Opening weekend studios get something like 70-80% of the cut. That's why there's such a huge focus on a movie opening huge. After that first weekend, the theaters get 50% of the cut and that keeps going up in the theater's favor the longer the movie plays. It's a racket.

With digital releases, if they release it via a platform they own they get 100% of the money. So if a movie needed $400M to break even with a theatrical release, they could break even with $200M digitally. Even PVOD is a better deal than theaters as the Apple, Google, or Amazon cut is a lot less than the 50%+ theaters take.
 
Airola

Airola

Member
Davey Cakes said:
People will pay $20-$30 to watch at home. It's the model that fits the moment. Sorry that we can't just will everything back to the way it was a year ago.
Click to expand...

Nah, most people will probably pay 9,99 a month for hundreds of films these days rather than 20-30 for one film.

Big movies still absolutely need to release the movie on movie theaters before offering it as a physical disc or as a digital download/rental.
They need to be sure it gets enough money before people have better chance to copy the film and share it online for free. Currently movie theaters are places where obtaining an illegal copy of it is the hardest to do.

For Tenet this absolutely was a bad time to release it. Most theaters can only sell tickets for half of the seats so there's zero chance for it to get rooms filled with people and it's very unfortunate for the movie. But they still need the movie theater money too. It would've been even worse to release it straight to video. It doesn't help the film either that it's really polarising. For me it's Nolan's worst movie, and the only movie of his I can say is actually bad, and not good or even ok. And I'm not alone with this opinion. This is the type of a movie that would probably be pirated like hell as it isn't as "universally" liked as movies like Interstellar or Inception were (yes, I know those movies have their haters too, but it's much different with Tenet).
 
poppabk

poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
I'm assuming this is part of the plan. They said at the outset they expect this to be a slow burn for months because there is zero else to watch.
Keeping other studios in the dark makes it riskier for others to release films. Considering the risk that WB is taking this seems fair.
 
EverydayBeast

EverydayBeast

thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
It takes 4 minutes to load up a movie on your screen that feels a lot less than passing through checkpoints and in the end it's a completely different experience than going to the theater.
 
Woo-Fu

Woo-Fu

Banned
Davey Cakes said:
Well, I imagine the NOTO will continue to lose leverage. It's not Hollywood's fault that people would rather stay home.
Click to expand...
Probably, videogames went through the same thing. Had to play nice with brick&mortar while slowly pushing digital distribution. Gamestop lost most of their leverage and the big box stores seem to be live and let live since they're far more diversified.
 
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ManaByte

ManaByte

Gold Member
#Phonepunk# said:
they should leave it in theaters. what other movies need to be showed instead? just leave it in and slowly people will see it over the rest of the year.
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That's what theater owners want, the longer it's in the theaters the more they make and the less money WB makes.
 
JordanN

JordanN

Banned
GloveSlap said:
Studios are screwed either way. Release in theaters and make no money or do day 1 digital and there is a HD torrent in hours.
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They need to be like Steam and just make the price mass consumer friendly.

Or if people buy digital, they must own it forever. That's the reason I still collect physical copies of games/movies. No way I want to pay for something once, and then the publisher decides to yank it off servers later.
 
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kunonabi

kunonabi

Member
ManaByte said:
Not really. On digital releases they make MORE money than they do releasing in theaters.

Opening weekend studios get something like 70-80% of the cut. That's why there's such a huge focus on a movie opening huge. After that first weekend, the theaters get 50% of the cut and that keeps going up in the theater's favor the longer the movie plays. It's a racket.

With digital releases, if they release it via a platform they own they get 100% of the money. So if a movie needed $400M to break even with a theatrical release, they could break even with $200M digitally. Even PVOD is a better deal than theaters as the Apple, Google, or Amazon cut is a lot less than the 50%+ theaters take.
Click to expand...

I just don't see that many people putting down 30$ down. I mean Disney said they got what, just 33$ million for Mulan's first weekend?
 
sol_bad

sol_bad

Member
ManaByte said:
I think most movie studios secretly would rather release their movies on their direct to consumer streaming services. If WB releases TENET on HBO Max for $20-$30, they keep 100% of that $20-$30. Theaters take 50%. Every penny of the $30 Disney makes on the Disney+ Mulan goes to them.

The problem is the National Organization of Theater Owners, which is basically the mafia and the studios are terrified of pissing them off.
Click to expand...

For someone that apparently works in the industry you have a weird way of thinking. I don't know why you keep talking about mafia crap. The fact is if studios don't release their movies in theatres, those theatres will shut down. Now imagine if every single theatre shuts down in America, it has a trickle effect around the world.

Fans of theatre lose out and have no where to go, and that's on a world wide scale, the world stage needs Hollywood to thrive for theatres to stay open everywhere.
Studios lose out because they lose an entire revenue stream. They lose out on half the money they could make, even more so.
Loss of profit = lower budgeted movies = loss of spectacle which is the reason people go to the theatres. Studios will be even less likely to take chances on new and interesting projects because they want sure money on VOD.

It's not about mafiaism, it's about an ecosystem that works for all parties involved to create entertainment in the best possible way.
 
T

Taxexemption

Member
No wonder it bombed. This was a spy movie? I had seen people talk about it but I was like "I'm going to wait for the reviews before I watch a movie about a dude who rents an apartment or landlord relations or whatever this is about."
 
AV

AV

We ain't outta here in ten minutes, we won't need no rocket to fly through space
Well sure it's "bombed" by non-apocalypse standards. We have people who will refuse to ever leave their damn houses again.

Frankly the movie industry needed a good, hard slap. Stop making me go to a crowded room full of noisy people to watch movies if I want to see them when they're new, it's retarded in this day and age. Multiplexes have their place for Hollywood blockbusters and smaller theaters are great for independent or cult movies with the fans, everything in between I would rather just pay to watch at home.
 
bender

bender

What time is it?
Just saw the trailer. I really liked John David Washington in Ballers. He's really starting to look a lot like Chad L Colemon's character Cutty from The Wire.
 
fran.fernandez

fran.fernandez

Member
ManaByte said:
Mulan apparently made $33M on Disney+ the first weekend. That's twice what Tenet did. If WB were to have put Tenet on HBO Max for like $20 it probably would've done very well.
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But this is about theater no?
mulan was release in Taiwan’s and mostly Asia, last time I check was 10m (boycott mulan wasn’t working well in TW)


but sure, release digital is the way to go, I buy/rent tenet day one.
 
Potato Chip PRO

Potato Chip PRO

Member
There's a lot into play here....
1. Times of crisis
2. Paying good money for tickets to see a movie that most probably won't understand what the damn plot was about
3. Corona inside a room (Free Real Estate)
4. I ain't spending 30 bucks on a bucket of Popcorn and Coke.
 
Goro Majima

Goro Majima

Kitty Genovese Member
Most of us have crazy huge TVs and the ability to either watch unlimited content for like $10-15 per month or do on demand rentals for a couple bucks without ever leaving the couch.

But then there’s movie theaters where you have to leave the house, subject your viewing experience to the unwashed masses while being unable to pause for a piss break, and then spend $12-15 per person just for the privilege of going (plus another optional $15-20 for a snack and a drink).

When you line those up side by side then movies look like a terrible value proposition anyway.

I have to imagine some people after breaking the habit of going to theaters just aren’t going to be that interested in going back.
 
nush

nush

Gold Member
Nikana said:
Just keep it in theaters. Not like anything else is coming out.
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Theatrical runs used to be a lot longer, maybe going back to that model for a bit would be good.

I've missed so many movies that I would have paid to see if they were not running for just a week and then just a few showings the following week.
 
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