As mentioned, the night before last (Friday, 9.4) I caught a 7 pm Tenet show at a Flagstaff Harkins plex. As the closing credits began to roll I got up and looked around and counted…oh, maybe 75 or 80 heads. Obviously a weak showing for an opening-weekend Friday, but under a pandemic mushroom cloud and especially with New York and Los Angeles theatres dark…not too bad.

Under normal conditions I would presume that the mind-blowing but challenging Tenet would pull in…what, $250 million domestic and maybe $750 million worldwide? (A decade ago Inception earned $292,576,195 domestic and $834,791,961 worldwide.) An exceptionally strong film might quintuple its first-weekend haul, and this is what Tenet will have to do stateside to make $100 million theatrically.

Current trade projections are that Tenet will generate a domestic tally of $20.2 million over the Labor Day weekend. And yet worldwide Chris Nolan‘s time-flipping thriller is approaching the $150 million mark. Around Europe and elsewhere Tenet brought in $78.3 million, bringing the global tally to $146.2 million.