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“But you can’t prepare to be closed for 90 days. “We were fortunate that we had some cash reserves, and we’re always trying to prepare for the worst,” says Brock Bagby, vice-president of B&B Theatres, which has been in his family for nearly a century and now operates more than 400 screens across the Midwest and the South. Even the best-managed cinema can’t survive not selling tickets for much longer. Around this time, rumors flew that AMC Entertainment, owner of America’s largest theater chain, was considering bankruptcy the company even furloughed its own CEO as shutdowns exacerbated preexisting debt issues.Īnd so, it might soon be too late to easily fire up the popcorn poppers and turn down the lights and expect everything to return to normal, like so much of the economy on pause. A few days later, however, all those theaters were forced to shut down again, likely due to fears of a second wave of infections. On March 23, still early in America’s shutdown, some saw hope in the news that around 500 Chinese movie theaters, tens of thousands of which had closed in January, were cautiously opening again. Some never stopped going: Even though the vast majority of the country’s 300-plus drive-ins had to close because of the pandemic, those that remained open saw a surge in attendance (and several weeks ago, we were treated to the surreal news that the entire weekend box-office report came from one drive-in in Ocala, Florida, which was still open.)īut just because you have a combination of nostalgia and cabin fever doesn’t mean you will go back if you are convinced it’s risky. “Our couch is going to have associations for us of this awful time.” One recent survey found that almost three out of four Americans said they missed going to movie theaters-which is significantly higher than the percentage of Americans who regularly went in the before times.
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“When this lifts, none of us are ever going to want to be anywhere close to our couch or our TV ever again,” predicts Richard Rushfield, who runs the popular film-industry newsletter The Ankler. People are desperate to get out of the house, get their kids out of the house, and get back to normal. In the wake of this pandemic, are movie theaters, having long since lost their essential place in our culture, going to become relics of the past? The traditional procession of movies through a sacrosanct “theatrical window”-when you have to get off the sofa and go to the multiplex and buy a ticket to see it-has been under pressure from the rise of vertically integrated streaming giants trying to rush their films onto new platforms. Today, even before the coronavirus pandemic closed the cinemas, big changes were underway in the industry. So once the threat began to fade, people flocked back. Movie houses were the only place to see movies, and movies were still pretty new and among the few entertainment options available to people. Of course, nobody sheltering in place in 1918 had the option of sitting at home and streaming on the sofa.
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