On Thursday, Christopher Nolan’s new would-be blockbuster Tenet came out in recently reopened theaters across the United States, following an expectations-surpassing $53 million international launch. Although the late-August debuts of Unhinged and The New Mutants already reinstated the American movie market in forgettable fashion, Nolan’s feature is the first big-budget tentpole to test mid-pandemic demand. Theaters in some states, including California and New York, remain closed after a nearly six-month moratorium on moviegoing, but thanks to Nolan’s name, Tenet represents a real referendum on most Americans’ willingness to brave the multiplex en masse.

The last time a Nolan-directed movie hit theaters, in 2017, Hollywood was facing what in pre-pandemic times struck some unsuspecting studio executives as an existential threat. By the standards of summers when domestic movie theaters were actually open, mid-2017 was a tough time for the movie industry. Despite strong showings from Wonder Woman, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Nolan’s Dunkirk, domestic movie revenue reached its lowest point in decades, dragged down by flops like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Baywatch, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, The Mummy, Transformers: The Last Knight, and The Dark Tower.

Those disappointments had something in common: They all received far-from-fresh scores on Rotten Tomatoes, which collects critics’ reviews and presents the percentage of them that the site deems positive or negative. After 2020’s total shutdown, past hand-wringing about box office hazards seems quaint, but three years ago, Hollywood was panicking about Rotten Tomatoes. Between June and early September 2017, Wired, the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and The New York Times, along with The Ringer, published lengthy reports examining studios’ widespread perception that the review aggregator was tanking attendance.

[Read Ben Lindbergh and Rob Arthur's data-driven deep dive into Rotten Tomatoes.]