Tenet: One cinema is showing the film 29 times today alone

When is Tenet next on? If you’re asking that question any time between 10.00am and 10.00pm , then the answer is “in a minute or two”. To take one site as an example, Cineworld in Dublin is today showing Christopher Nolan’s time-twisting epic a dizzying 29 times.

Twenty-three of those screenings are in conventional format. Three are on the enormous IMAX screen. Three are in the bizarre 4DX format that shakes your chair and sprays moisture in your face when John David Washington gets aboard his speedboat.

If you are more of an old-school cineaste then seek out the projection on 70mm celluloid at the Irish Film Institute. It's also on at The Light House and its sister cinema Pálás in Galway. There are 15 screenings a day in Movies@Dundrum. Everyone able to sling a sheet up in their back garden is showing Tenet.

Cinemas were permitted to reopen on June 25th, but only a few exhibitors braved regulations to invite punters through the doors. The Movies@ chain was in there early. The Omniplex Group followed shortly afterwards. Others were more cautious. With social distancing set at 2m, cinemas were limited to a total capacity of just 21 per cent. Almost as daunting was the lack of content.

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Only a trickle of new films has gone into cinemas since that date and none of those was a high-end blockbuster. Disney’s Mulan was delayed and then channelled straight to the Disney+ streaming service. Black Widow and Wonder Woman 1984 were pushed towards the end of the year. The next Fast and the Furious film was moved to 2021.

Today marks the next big step in the normalisation of the industry. Tenet is the first big-budget high-end release to hit cinemas since Pixar’s Onward arrived (before promptly leaving) back on March 6th.

Meanwhile, the Irish Film Institute, flagship for domestic cinema, reopens its doors for the first time in five months.

The IFI will, as ever, be screening the best arthouse and independent releases. They kick things off with the monochrome reissue of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (the original version was still doing decent business when lockdown hit) and showings of Irish films Calm With Horses and Broken Law.

But the institute will also be finding a home for Tenet in its most luxurious 70mm incarnation. Everything is about Tenet.

This past week has seen the launch of a campaign by the Irish Film Distributors Association – in cooperation with their UK partners in Cinema First – to “capture the attention of audiences across the country and remind them of the unique experience that only the big screen can offer”.

The #Lovecinema campaign hangs around an impressive cinematic montage created by Empire Design that features 50 films from cinema history and teases upcoming releases such as No Time to Die, the latest James Bond film; Denis Villeneuve’s Dune; Marvel’s Black Widow and, yes, Tenet.

It is, in some senses, unfair to expect too much from the Nolan film. True, it is the only big show in town, but, with social distancing still at 2m, exhibitors will struggle to take anything like their normal haul on a late-summer blockbuster.

Nolan’s picture opens a week later in the United States (rare, if not unheard of, for such a large-scale blockbuster), but cinemas in many parts of that country are still closed. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has been under pressure to open the city’s movie theatres, but has so far held firm.

“I am sure there is a whole group people who say, ‘I cannot live without going to the movies,’” he said recently. “But on a relative risk scale, a movie theatre is less essential and poses a high risk. It is congregant. It is one ventilation system. You are seated there for a long period of time.”

The only way that Tenet can turn a profit on release is if it hangs around in cinemas for a very long time. It has been calculated that the picture would need to make somewhere in the region of $800 million to break even. That would be enough to get it in the top 10 releases for 2019, but that chart was not compiled in a time of plague.

On the other hand, competition is so sparse Tenet really could be sitting in cinemas until Christmas.

Everything depends on the US. The current cinema model is based around the near-simultaneous release of top-end features in all major territories. If the US continues to register dire Covid figures then the planned opening of many potential cash cows could be threatened worldwide.

When Die Another Day, originally scheduled for April, became the first film to move in response to Covid many thought the distributors were overreacting. It then seemed crazy to move the Bond film way back to November.

Now, even that date looks a tad risky.