Christopher Nolan’s Tenet has been a wild ride over the last month on the release date front. Originally set to come out last Friday, July 17, the movie ended up being pushed back twice due to the current health crisis, and now word’s come in that the latest Nolan flick has been delayed yet again.
After previously being moved to July 31 and then being slotted into August 12, Tenet has now been taken off Warner Bros’ calendar completely, with no release date revealed. However, the plan is still to deliver Tenet sometime later this year according to WB chairman Toby Emmerich, who said the following in an official statement:
We will share a new 2020 release date imminently for Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s wholly original and mind-blowing feature. We are not treating Tenet like a traditional global day-and-date release, and our upcoming marketing and distribution plans will reflect that.
To clarify on what Toby Emmerich means by a “traditional” release, according to sources who spoke with Variety, the studio will have to be “flexible” with how it delivers Tenet to the masses. So with movie theaters overseas starting to open back up, whereas it doesn’t look like a lot of domestic theaters will be doing that anytime soon, it’s possible that Tenet could launch in international territories first, and then hit North America at a later date.
Whether that ends up being the case or not, audiences will nonetheless have to wait longer to see Tenet. While Warner Bros previously only moved it back several weeks at a time, in part to accommodate Christopher Nolan’s wish for Tenet to help usher audiences back into theaters, now the studio is being more cautious. It’s unclear when WB will announce Tenet’s new release date, but if things go according to plan, the movie will arrive before 2020 is over. Then again, in a year filled with so much unpredictability, perhaps there’s a scenario where WB decides to just play it as safe as possible and hold Tenet for 2021.
Along with announcing Tenet’s latest delay, Warner Bros also announced that The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, which was previously slated for September 11, has been postponed to June 4, 2021. Other WB titles Wonder Woman 1984 and Dune are still scheduled for October 2 and December 18, respectively, but don’t discount the possibility that they’ll be pushed back too.
While Tenet has vacated August, there are still a few major theatrical releases on the docket for that month; namely Mulan on August 21, followed by Bill & Ted Face The Music and The New Mutants on August 28. Again though, with the way things are going on the pandemic front, it’s entirely possible these movies will also have to be pushed back, resulting in a summer movie season without any new big screen releases.
Tenet follows a secret agent being tasked to stop World War III, with a strange phenomenon called time inversion factoring into the narrative. The main cast includes John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, Michael Caine, Dimple Kapadia and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, among others.
Keep checking in with CinemaBlend for more updates concerning Tenet, including its new release date. In the meantime, keep track of the movies still expected to come out in theaters later this year with our 2020 release schedule.
