You read the title correctly. We don’t really understand either. Epic Games’ incredibly popular free-to-play shooter, Fortnite, will be hosting an event tonight (May 21st) at 8PM ET to debut the second trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet.
The acclaimed director is known both for his Batman trilogy starring Christan Bale and his high-concept blockbusters. In the last decade, he’s made Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, and Dunkirk. Tenet will be his 11th film to date and is an espionage thriller that plays with the concept of time (but there’s no time travel), like many of his other movies.
Today’s announcement comes as a pretty major surprise. Yes, Fortnite has hosted events with Avengers and Star Wars but Christopher Nolan is a very… particular man. He’s an “auteur” and is very set in his ways. He doesn’t own a cell phone, doesn’t use email, and he is very particular about the way films are viewed. He’s a strong advocate of the theatrical experience and shoots all of his movies on film rather than digital, usually opting for IMAX format when available.
He wants his films to be seen as big and loud as possible, with an audience. So, to a degree it does make sense to have a sort of “communal” event in Fortnite. But you’d imagine he doesn’t want people jumping around and shooting rockets into the sky while the new trailer for Tenet. Whether he actually signed off on this himself is unknown but he likes to curate his movies pretty heavily.
Tenet is currently still slated for a July 17th theatrical release with no rumors of a delay currently. Warner Brothers is closely monitoring the global situation to determine if the movie will need to be pushed but both the studio and Nolan are adamant about releasing it as soon as possible.
