New Theater Chain Information
By George Robbins
Movie theaters are in a bit of trouble in regards to their current financial situations due to the fact they aren’t drumming up any business. This has been the biggest issue for these companies since the announcement of the coronavirus pandemic back in the middle of March. They have been closed down ever since while still having to pay money to maintain their screens should they actually be able to open up any time in the near future as planned. As far as many theaters are concerned, they want to reopen their doors to the public by July so they can start earning some sort of revenue again to try and stay open. There are a lot of things that need to be planned for before they can open up their doors again.
Theaters are among those businesses that must take extra care to ensure that people stay healthy by making sure people are distanced from one another even when seated. They must also make sure that the premises stay clean and sanitary for every person who walks through the door. This will be a difficult task considering they get their money by selling seats and they are now going to be forced to limit the amount of seats sold. This will not stop some theaters from opening their doors since Cinemark just became the first theater chain to announce a reopening date. Cinemark has said that they plan on reopening theaters stateside on June 19th. The question is how exactly do they plan on opening with no new movies.
There are a number of theaters that have stated that they wanted a reopening some time before the start of the summer or by the beginning of July. Cinemark is currently the theater chain the will reopen first, but this means they will be the first ones to test the waters. They won’t be able to reopen in every part of the country immediately because some places have theaters listed for later reopenings, but in most places they will be able to open their doors. This is when the true challenge will start to kick in however, because the real issue is just how many people will actually end up going out to the movies at all. With no new movies to show and the risk of potentially getting infected being pretty high in those circumstances, why would anyone want to go to the movies.
AMC theaters recently announced that, due to the shut downs of their over 900 theaters worldwide, they are in a very serious amount of financial trouble that they may not be able to recover from. On top of loss of revenue in the first quarter and zero revenue in the past couple of months, they understand that they won’t really have a leg to stand on even if they do manage to reopen soon. Without any new content to show the public, they don’t have any way to draw people back into their theaters and they know it will be a long time before people will really start going back to them again. On top of this, due to a conflict with Universal, they will not be showing any upcoming Universal films which will only further ruin any chances of revenue. Overall, it is not a good period in time for any theater chains and it could be a time where many end up being bought out by other companies.