A $200 million gamble that ended a 20-year run of success and failed to save cinema as promised defies the laws of time on Netflix

The summer of 2020 was a strange time for cinema – and the entire world, for that matter – but Christopher Nolan decided to stick to his guns and release Tenet exclusively in theaters for the sake of the industry, even if things didn’t quite go to plan.

While a $363 million take at the box office was remarkable given the restrictions in place, a budget north of $200 million coupled with a marketing campaign that was forced into several stops and starts saw the time-bending action blockbuster lose a fortune for Warner Bros., while a still-respectable Rotten Tomatoes score of 69 percent made it the filmmaker’s worst-reviewed feature ever.

The studio then decided that it was going day-and-date with all of its major releases on the big screen and HBO Max, which ultimately led to Nolan severing ties and ending a fruitful working relationship that had seen him tied exclusively to WB for two decades and brought consistent critical and commercial success, which has admittedly worked out very well for Universal based on those Oppenheimer numbers.

Nolan tried and failed to single-handedly revive the flagging theatrical experience with Tenet, which was admirable in and of itself, but the temporal twister has at least continued sinking its hooks into streaming crowds. Per FlixPatrol, since being made available on Netflix in multiple countless countries around the world, it’s instantly debuted as the 14th most-watched feature on the global charts, not a bad return considering it can only be streamed in a fraction of the nations where the service is available.