‘Tenet’ Tops Box Office With Lowest Weekend Gross In 32 Years

In terms of weekends with movies playing in wide national release, Tenet’s fourth-weekend gross was the lowest chart-topper since 1988.

I wrote back in 2013 about how Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight became a rare big movie to top the weekend box office four times in a row. It opened with $158 million (a record at the time) and then easily topped Step Brothers ($31 million) and X-Files I Want to Believe ($10 million) in weekend two with a then-record $75 million second-weekend gross. Weekend three would likely have been topped by The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor had it not been gifted with miserable pre-release reviews, with its $40 million (compared to $43 million for The Mummy in 1999 and $68 million for The Mummy Returns in 2001) coming in just below the $42 million third-weekend gross of the Batman/Joker sequel.  

It topped in its fourth weekend because Seth Rogen and James Franco’s The Pineapple Express opened on a Wednesday, and with it a $12 million opening day. Its Wed-Sun cume was $41.3 million but its $23.2 million Fri-Sun frame was just below the $26 million weekend-four gross of The Dark Knight. And thus the Batman sequel fell to second place in weekend five, behind the $25.8 million Fri-Sun frame (of a $35 million Wed-Sun debut) of Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder. Had The Mummy 3 been a better movie and/or had Pineapple Express opened on a Friday, The Dark Knight’s reign may have been just two-to-three weekends. In related news, Chris Nolan’s Tenet is the top movie of the weekend for the fourth frame in a row.

The John David Washington/Robert Pattinson sci-fi actioner topped the domestic box office for its fourth frame because there’s nothing else of note opening between now and, one hopes, the October 9 launch of Liam Neeson’s Honest Thief and Robert De Niro’s The War with Grandpa, followed by the October 16 debut of 2 Hearts. Its $3.4 million in weekend four, down just 26% from its $4.7 million Fri-Sun gross last weekend and bringing its 25-day cume to $41.2 million. So it’s likely, by default, that Warner Bros.’ Tenet will be the top movie of the weekend for just one more Fri-Sun frame, a frame which was supposed to house the (fifth) release date for WB’s Wonder Woman 1984 (since moved to December 25).

Nonetheless, Tenet is a classic “rank doesn’t matter” box office story. After 25 days in theaters, following a $9.6 million Fri-Sun frame amid a $20.2 million Thurs-Mon Labor Day launch (counting previews and Canadian box office from the prior week), the film is still $7-$8 million away from the respective Fri-Sun opening weekends for Dunkirk in 2017, Interstellar in 2014 and (during a $73 million Wed-Sun launch) Batman Begins in 2005. Had STX not moved Gerard Butler’s “Look out, comet!” disaster flick Greenland from September 25, it would have been this weekend’s top movie. And if Wonder Woman 1984 had stuck around, it would have surely been the first big opening for any movie since Onward’s $38 million debut in early March.

Tenet’s $3.4 million domestic gross is the lowest such chart-topping total for any film amid mostly-open theaters in almost exactly 32 years. In the late September/early October weekend of 1988, Gorillas in the Mist added 543 theaters for a 558-theater second weekend, where the Sigourney Weaver-as-Dian Fossey-biopic topped with $3.451 million. A week prior, David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (starring Jeremy Irons as twin gynecologists) topped with the box office with a $3 million opening weekend. Until this weekend, there had never again been another weekend (with theaters in most of the country open) where the top movies earned less than $4 million. Basic Instinct earned $4 million in weekends seven and eight before Lethal Weapon 3 kicked off summer 1992 with a $33 million opening.

That $33 million launch for Lethal Weapon 3 was the second-biggest Fri-Sun ever, behind Batman’s $43 million debut in 1989, and a month later Batman Returns would open with $47 million. As we cross the sixth month of the coronavirus pandemic, it won’t be until, at best, the opening of No Time to Die on November 20 before we see another opening even as large as $33 million. And with Tenet playing mostly unopposed in terms of big movies at least until October 9, it’s probably going to top the weekend box office again next week, perhaps giving us the first under-$3 million chart-topper since A Fish Called Wanda and Die Hard both earned over/under $2.55 million in their respective tenth weekends of release.

Tenet has continued to hold well overseas, earning another $15.8 million overseas (-36% overall) for a new non-domestic cume of $241 million. That brings the film’s global cume to $283 million in just over a month of theatrical play. As noted on Tuesday, the film would be doing halfway decently for a live-action original (or new-to-you sci-fi fantasy adaptation) directed by anyone other than Nolan. Tenet has out-grossed or will soon outgross the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending ($185 million in 2015), Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland ($209 million in 2015), Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets ($225 million in 2017), Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 ($242 million in 2017), Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger ($261 million in 2013), Andrew Stanton’s John Carter ($284 million in 2012), and Peter Berg’s Battleship ($302 million in 2012).

The choice to put it in theaters during a pandemic, in the hopes of keeping movie theaters alive until the storm passed, resulted in Tenet earning half of what it otherwise would have worldwide had it been moved to next July, and maybe 1/3 of its domestic potential. Whether the plan “worked” is still to be seen. Tenet’s frankly mediocre domestic grosses (with New York and much of California still closed for business) scared off most of the remaining 2020 tentpoles. Wonder Woman 1984 moved to Christmas while Candyman and Black Widow moved to 2021. Honestly, I’d argue that Disney’s Mulan earning allegedly so-so PVOD numbers may have done more to “save” theaters (by reinforcing the need for global theatrical releases for tentpoles) than Tenet’s equally so-so global earnings.