Weekend Box Office: Tenet Drops From First Place In Seventh Week

Tenet's run at the top of the US box office, where it has sat for six weeks almost unopposed, has ended. The film to finally topple Christopher Nolan's palindromic action spectacle is War with Grandpa, which earned $3.6 million in the US during its opening weekend.

Deadline is reporting that War with Grandpa has overtaken Tenet this weekend, and that 90% of cinema-goers were satisfied that they'd had a safe experience. The film, which is unrelated to DeNiro's earlier grandpa movie Dirty Grandpa, sees a grandfather (DeNiro) and his grandson (Oakes Fegley) break into an escalating prank war after the old man moves in with his daughter (Uma Thurman) and her family. It also stars Rob Riggle, Cheech Marin, Jane Seymour, and Christopher Walken.

Tenet earned $2.1 million, meaning that the box office take of the weekend was still, on the whole, extremely low--and that War with Grandpa opened well below Tenet's $20.2 million opening. Tenet has enjoyed six weeks at number 1, earning $48.3 million at the domestic box office so far. The film's drop off means that it has been viewed as a disappointment; if it had performed better, we might not have seen movies like Dune, No Time To Die, and Black Widow get delayed into 2021.

There's really no precedent outside of COVID-19 pandemic times to compare these numbers to. Tenet's numbers have been viewed as disappointing, but internationally it's done better, bringing it a total of $323 million worldwide. This makes it the third highest-grossing film of the year. For the first time ever, the year's highest grossing film is not an English-language picture--the Chinese film The Eight Hundred has earned over $441 million.

Here's the US box office top 5 for the weekend, via Box Office Mojo.

US Box Office, October 9-11, 2020

1. War with Grandpa ($3.6 million)
2. Tenet ($2.1 million)
3. Hocus Pocus ($1.2 million)
4. The New Mutants ($685k)
5. Unhinged ($660k)