^I'm not saying foreign box office is unimportant or incapable of carrying a movie, even to a sequel. The point is simply that foreign box office brings less money per ticket than domestic box office to the studio, so a movie that does 500m overseas and 400m domestic is just not as big a success for the studio as a movie that does 500m domestic and 400m overseas. 900m worldwide is never a thing to sneeze at, obviously, but not every 900m is equal.
And in the case of Tenet specifically, we're talking about 50 million domestic over seven weeks (compare that to Interstellar or Inception, which are the obvious benchmarks for Tenet, which both made around or above 50m domestic on their opening weekend). And in the same period of time, about 280m foreign, which is much better than the domestic, but is not as good for the studio as it would've been to have 280m domestic.
And even without being able to say exactly how much that 280m foreign really translates to compared to the domestic, the movie still hasn't even broken even worldwide. 205m budget means it needs roughly 410m gross to actually start making a profit.
Oh, I didn't realize they got less money from foreign markets, I thought they got the same as from the US.No, but Disney also doesn't have to share the revenue with theaters when they release on Disney+, so a movie wouldn't need to make close to a billion for Disney to generate the same profit. In the US the studios get about 50% from the box office, less overseas, between 20 and 40%, let's say 30%. For simplicity's sake let's assume the studio gets 40% of the worldwide box office, so from a billion dollar box office only 400 million go to Disney and that's a slightly more reasonable number, still not easy to reach with streaming but slightly more realistic than a billion.
And depending on how long the pandemic lasts at some point some money via streaming will be be more desirable than zero money from the box office, the studios can't sit on all of their big movies forever.
It made 280 million overseas, that's not even enough to cover the production budget if we assume WB got about $85 million from that plus about $25 million from the US. Tenet's theatrical release was a financial disaster, there's no way to call it anything else.