how is this (and others) going to make any profit?

It’s all very much unknown. I work in a cinema in the UK that has just recently been allowed to reopen and we’ve been very quiet but we have no new films to show.

Both Tenet and Mulan were pushed back to August and I can potentially see them both being delayed again if the studios don’t feel confident they’ll make the profit they want. If they release in August and underperform it’ll probably make the studios delay the other movies that were supposed to come out this year.

With no new movies to show cinemas are going to struggle to make any money. Plus with movies like The Batman, Matrix 4, Jurassic 6 they’re not even in production right now as it’s not safe to do so.

Streaming isn’t really a viable option for these huge budget movies as once you make it available in HD at home there will be people who will just unfortunately pirate it instead of supporting the film causing a huge loss for the studio and cinemas not making any money from the studio’s choice to go streaming.

It might have to be that Tenet and Mulan are the only new films released in cinemas for a long while so they have plenty of time to make the profit necessary to cover their $200 million budgets.

"I guess they could release them via streaming maybe that would be more profitable until stuff goes back to normal (i.e. when theres a cure) ."

I am sorry,but why people seems to ignore the fact that we already have many cures?? Only because the mainstream media and some politicians insist to talk about the vaccine,but we actually have many cures for this. So really,we should just move on from this covid mania.

It most likely will play in theater for at least 3 months.

Marketing for Tenet world wide will be another $ 100.- mill. I.e for this film to make a profit the gross will need to be higher than $600 mill to break even.
However its not unlikely that Tenet have secured lucrative product placement agreements that may give them $ 100.- mill that are routed back to the producers and not part of the production budget.

I think a lack of competition will help it.

There's not going to be a ton of films playing at this time.

The only other major release will be Mulan, and then nothing else until No Time to Die, Wonder Woman, and Black Widow in November. The film will likely have a longer play period in theatres too.

If it holds a steady release for 3-4 months it should be able to at least break even with its budget even if ticket sales are down.

wonder if the studios release this and WW84, BW etc but as limited releases then they go straight to stream early ...(and maybe the same with stuff shooting now like Batman, Matrix etc) then the likes of Paramount, WBros etc do their own stream services like Disney and thats sort of it for cinemas.. they turn into a bit of a novelty like drive ins - still there but way fewer.. and the majority of movies is stream with the odd limited release for big stuff like Star Wars, Avengers etc