LOS ANGELES, - People who closely follow box office earnings have noticed a surprising lack of transparency surrounding ticket sales for “Tenet,” the $200 million-budgeted sci-fi epic from director Christopher Nolan that released last weekend in U.S. theaters.
Though it started playing in theaters on Thursday, Sept. 3, Warner Bros. waited until Sunday, Sept. 6 to officially announce opening weekend grosses. “Tenet” earned $20 million over the long weekend, a middling result for a film of its size. Box office reports are one of the most public-facing activities that studios undergo. A hit opening weekend allows them to trumpet the good news in advertisements and through internal communications. But there’s a downside to those bragging rights. It also forces studios to own their mistakes -- a miss is a miss, after all.
In normal times, executives that are involved in distributing films get access to grosses by the hour. Studios work with the research company Rentrak and its parent corporation Comscore to report daily numbers and publish box office charts each weekend that are widely distributed across the entertainment industry. Studios pay a lot of money to get down-to-the-minute updates, with the agreement that rivals have access to info from other distributors.
Warner Bros. and Comscore declined to comment on this report. However, studio sources argue they aren’t obligated to share numbers with anyone else and stress that there’s no precedent for releasing a movie in a pandemic. Comparing “Tenet” to any other movie, one source said, is “apples and kumquats.” By distributing numbers in the traditional fashion, anyone on the outside could jump to conclusions and categorize “Tenet” has a financial disaster.
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Source: Variety - 🏆 108. / 63 Read more »