When you’re lauded as one of the most consistently brilliant, ambitious, and successful filmmakers of the modern era, you invariably find yourself being held to a much higher standard than almost anyone else. As such, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was viewed as a massive disappointment, despite being successful by the standards of the time.
A $363 million box office tally and a 69 percent Rotten Tomatoes score are numbers a lot of studio-backed blockbusters would be more than happy with, but Nolan exists on a different level to the majority of his contemporaries. His temporal time-bender may have been the highest-grossing post-pandemic Hollywood release of 2020, then, but it still ended up losing money for Warner Bros.
Not only that, but it additionally ranks as the worst-reviewed entry in his filmography on the aggregation site, even if a 76 percent user rating highlights that audiences were ever so slightly more enamored than critics. Tenet is regularly incredible but often impenetrable, and it’s the constant juxtaposition between the two that ultimately harms the end product.
Nolan admirably stuck to his guns to ensure that Tenet would debut on the big screen and the big screen only, but there’s a high chance plenty of people are now watching his twisting action thriller on a cellphone, given that it’s been playing like gangbusters on-demand this week.
As per FlixPatrol, John David Washington doubling back on himself has reaped huge rewards for the existential head-scratcher, with Tenet currently one of the top titles on both Prime Video and iTunes, where it’s even managed to snag third spot in the United Kingdom on the former.
