It has been officially announced that Tenet will get an HBO Max release. As announced on HBO Max's Twitter, Nolan's newest movie will hit the streamer on May 1. Although Christopher Nolan made his feelings on the subject publicly known when WarnerMedia announced that the entire slate of 2021 Warner Bros. movies would be heading to streaming the same day they hit the big screen, it seems there are no hard feelings between the studio and one of its favorite directors as the former preps a streaming release for the 2020 feature.
Back when times were much more precedented and a whole lot more certain, the time-bending action thriller stood a real chance at joining the billion-dollar club given Nolan’s reputation and standing within the industry, but the $200 million globetrotting epic struggled to convince audiences to return to their local multiplex en masse. Its box office haul was still enough to make it the highest-grossing Hollywood blockbuster released during the COVID-19 era.
However, art is art whichever way you want to look at it, and you can now watch all 150 minutes of Tenet on a Game Boy Advance if you feel so inclined, which is no doubt exactly how Nolan envisioned it being viewed when he was developing the intricately plotted thriller. If he doesn’t believe we need to hear the dialogue, then why shouldn’t the sprawling set pieces and talk of temporal pincer movements be crammed onto a handful of cartridges running at 6 frames per second with a screen resolution of 192x128?
The majority of Nolan’s work dating back to Batman Begins has received widespread critical and commercial acclaim, racking up plenty of awards season recognition, but Tenet has proved to be a little more divisive. Early reactions were mixed, and since then almost every aspect of the film has been picked apart and dissected, but we’re still no closer to reaching a definitive conclusion as to whether it’s another home run for one of the few names in Hollywood who can get away with churning out mega-budget existential thrillers that mess with the very fabric of time and reality, or a misguided folly driven by an unconvincing gimmick that falls apart the second you hold it up to intense scrutiny.
Either way, if you’re an HBO Max subscriber, then you can revisit Tenet from beginning to middle, back to the beginning and eventually the end in just a few weeks when it lands there on May 1.