Tenet-pole

As goes Tenet, so goes the entire film industry.

Christopher Nolan's latest has been pushed back a second time. Whereas once it was set to debut on July 17th, then that dropped two weeks later to July 31st. Now it is has fallen again, another 12 days, to August 12th.

This matters not because I am dying to see Tenet, though I guess I am -- really, I'm just dying to see anything that does not look like it was made for Netflix, or seemed like a perfectly logical candidate to end up there.

No, it's because no one else seems ready to do a damn thing until Tenet figures out what it's doing.

This is not entirely true -- the most recent plan was to have Disney bring out Mulan a week earlier than that, on July 24th. I have not heard that this has been postponed yet, but in the wake of Tenet's decision, it may now be.

The theory for some time now is that Tenet, with its massive girth, length and Christopher Nolan-ness, would point the way for every other movie with aspirations to open while it's still summer in the U.S. It was fashioned -- if not by official assignation, then by group consensus -- as a kind of tentpole for the whole summer movie season. A Tenet-pole, if you will.

But as the film continues to recede toward autumn, I'm wondering if movie theaters can take it.

We've got some open here. And even though they are not the ones with the biggest screens -- those seem to be waiting for a steady flow of Hollywood releases -- you get the sense that they, too, are hanging on in anticipation; waiting, if not for Tenet itself, then at least for Tenet's run-off.

But instead of providing run-off, Tenet has just run off.

I'm not saying it's the wrong decision. We're second-waving it even here in Australia. In fact, whereas things looked pretty optimistic a couple weeks ago, now I'm actually hearing that there are runs on the grocery stores again. Seriously? That's so fucking March, people.

But I feel like, in a very real sense, whole giant swaths of the economy are wrapped up in Tenet's giant, gangly legs, and as it trips, so does everything else. I feel like there are theaters that may have targeted Tenet's opening weekend as a time to finally throw open their doors, to put Tenet on all ten damn screens in the place at once, so they can reduce available capacity in each screening space by two-thirds.

If that was their plan, now they will have to wait 12 days longer, and that's 12 further days that hungry theater staff won't be working, and that their employers will not be making any revenue in order to pay them. How long can it continue?

You know what, I'm pretty much jack of all this COVID-19 shit.