Refresh for latest…: Christopher Nolan’s Tenet added a further estimated $58.1M at the international box office this weekend, taking the overseas cume on the Warner Bros title to $126M after two sessions. With the time-bending film debuting in the U.S. this frame, the estimated worldwide total is $146.2M. The global weekend figure of $78.3M includes previews and covers 46 markets on 52,913 screens. The offshore holdovers dropped 36%.
Tenet, the first major studio release of the pandemic era, began international rollout last weekend in 40 offshore markets and Canada (the latter’s previews, we understand have been rolled up into the domestic number this weekend which is also a four-day North American holiday).
Yesterday, Tenet crossed $100M overseas (see Friday/Saturday updates here).
Six new overseas markets released in the sophomore session including China and Russia. The China launch came in at $30M — the low end of the range we provided during the weekend — and landed No. 2 behind local smash The Eight Hundred. It was a close race (less than $3M separated the films), but the Tenet start reps the best debut of a Nolan film in the market. Nolan’s films tend to leg out and Tenet leads presales in China on Monday and is currently jockeying with The Eight Hundred through the rest of the week. Disney’s Mulan arrives in China next Friday.
This weekend, Mulan began a soft theatrical rollout in the markets where Disney+ is not a factor. The live-action update on the animated classic grossed an estimated $5.9M from nine hubs, landing No. 1 in the UAE, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. In both Singapore and Thailand it scored the best opening weekend of 2020.
Turning back to Tenet, the lead markets are now China ($30M), the UK ($13.1M), France ($10.7M), Germany ($8.7M) and Korea ($8.2M). And, in a win for IMAX, the format had its biggest global box office weekend ever in September with Tenet taking $11.1M from 1,168 screens in 43 markets, 14.2% of the overall global weekend. The worldwide IMAX cume is now $16.3M, more than 11% of the movie’s total to date. Of that, Tenet grossed $5.3M from 649 screens in China — nearly 18% of the nationwide gross, despite IMAX theaters only accounting for 1% of screens.
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