Christopher Nolan’s Mind-Bending Sci-Fi Epic Is Leaving Netflix Soon—Catch It Before It’s Gone
Christopher Nolan’s time-twisting sci-fi epic Tenet is counting down to its Netflix exit—stream the technically dazzling, brain-bending thriller before it disappears.
If you were planning to stream Christopher Nolan's time-twisting epic on Netflix, the clock really is ticking. Tenet is about to vanish from the platform right as the calendar flips, because of course it is.
When it leaves Netflix
Tenet exits Netflix on January 1. In other words, the last full day to stream it there is December 31. That's per What's On Netflix, which tracks Netflix's rotating library. So if you were saving your rewatch (and yes, subtitles help), now would be a good time.
Quick refresher on the movie
Nolan's 2020 sci-fi thriller follows a CIA operative known only as the Protagonist (John David Washington), who gets pulled into a shadowy organization called Tenet. With the help of an ally named Neil, he tries to head off a global disaster tied to tech that can mess with the flow of time. Standing in their way: Andrei Sator, a ruthless Russian oligarch with his own plans for that tech.
The cast is stacked: Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson all factor into the chaos. The film made headlines for its huge-scale stunt work and precision engineering, and also for being the movie that half the audience wanted to talk about after and the other half wanted to watch again immediately to figure out what just happened.
How it landed the first time
Tenet was released in 2020, during that awkward window when theaters started reopening after pandemic shutdowns. The rollout was bumpy and unusual, but the movie still grossed about $360 million worldwide on a reported production budget north of $200 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
Reception, in a nutshell
On Rotten Tomatoes, Tenet sits at 70 percent from 380 reviews. Critics widely praised the scale and technical craft, while plenty also flagged the movie's love of complexity as both the point and the problem.
"Christopher Nolan's Tenet is a film which can be enjoyed, but it's highly likely that you won't really understand it. It takes a lot of big ideas - and a lot of big moviemaking techniques to deliver a film which is mesmerising but very flawed."
Bottom line
If Tenet is on your Netflix list, you have until New Year's Eve to hit play. After that, you'll be hunting it down somewhere else.