Melinda Sue Gordon; ©2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved.(LOS ANGELES) — Hindsight is 20/20 but Tenet director Christopher Nolan is feeling “very lucky” that he was still able to release his film in theaters amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. 

“It was great to see how audiences in places where the virus had been managed carefully and efficiently, where they could safely go back to movie theaters, people came back in great numbers,” he told Entertainment Tonight.

Even so, Nolan admitted that there was some “frustration” that arose as well around not being able to travel and experience the film with audiences across the globe. 

“But at the end of the day, 2020 has been a year of tremendous adversity for everybody on the planet, so we feel very lucky — I feel very lucky — to have been working and to have been engaged in a creative pursuit,” he said.  

Nolan was one of the first directors to release a film in theaters in the middle of the global pandemic, and it doesn’t seem like many are following in his footsteps.

It was also recently announced that Warner Bros. made a deal to simultaneously debut their 2021 blockbusters both in theaters and on HBO Max, a decision which Nolan said left him in “disbelief.”

“There’s such controversy around it, because they didn’t tell anyone,” he explained. “They’ve got some of the top filmmakers in the world, they’ve got some of the biggest stars in the world who worked for years in some cases on these projects very close to their hearts that are meant to be big-screen experiences… And now they’re being used as a loss-leader for the streaming service — for the fledgling streaming service — without any consultation.”

Nolan added, “They deserved to be consulted and spoken to about what was going to happen to their work.”

By Danielle Long
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