Cinemas Struggling to Survive During Pandemic
What is their fate now with their closure during the pandemic?
Thanksgiving is for family gatherings and for blockbuster movies. This year, however, no one will be headed to the cinemas.
Movie theaters have been closed since the start of Covid-19 in mid-March. Empty, locked down, and dull, movie theaters have attempted to take health precautions and stay shut down until further notice.
Some theaters have attempted to stay flexible amid Covid guidelines by allowing the public to “rent out” an entire theater within a limit of up to 20 people for $99, installing new air filtration systems, offering curbside snacks such as popcorn and even remodeling seating placement to accommodate social distancing guidelines.
However, the efforts of movie theaters have not drawn back the large audiences it used to have and Hollywood fears there might be no luck with these strategies so far. Nonetheless, major movie releases such as “No Time to Die”, “A Quiet Place Part II”, “Avatar 2”, “Dune”, “Black Widow”, and “Cruella”, and many more, have been pushed off into 2021 and even 2022 in the case of “The Batman” starring Robert Pattinson.
“AMC Theaters — by far the biggest movie theater chain in the United States — expects to post a $2.4 billion first-quarter loss in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic,” said Travis Bean in a Forbes article. Similar to AMC Theaters, several cinemas are experiencing tremendous losses in sales. Nonetheless, the film industry speculates it will never be the same. The majority have opted for other alternative ways to watch movies, such as releasing them on Netflix and Hulu, or offering them in drive-in movie theaters.
“I don’t know if the theaters are ever going to recover from this,” Dennis B., an employee in the film industry, said in an interview. I feel like we might go back to how it was 80 years ago when the studios owned the theaters, that’s where I really feel like where it’s going. I think they’re going to start buying up these theaters and they’re going to only put they’re films in their theaters.”
Priscilla Caballero can be reached at [email protected].
