It Looks Like California Theaters Will Stay Shut For Awhile Longer
By George Robbins
Movie theaters opening up has been something that has been in discussion for months at this point due to the state of affairs for the theater companies. From the day they first shut their doors they started suffering from the lack of income and employees were either furloughed or laid off entirely. Theater owners very quickly pushed to be allowed to reopen when states were given the opportunity to allow businesses to reopen to the public. However, this would not end up working out for many theaters as the states had started taking a so-called “phased” approach to reopening businesses to the public. This meant that high-risk businesses that could spread the virus quicker would be among the last places to reopen their doors to the public.
Eventually, theaters were given the greenlight to reopen their doors to the public after a few weeks had gone by, at least for some states. However, this didn’t exactly help anyone but private theater owners and even then they were in trouble. With some theaters reopened it was hopeful that things would soon be able to pick up a little bit. Unfortunately, opening businesses up again had the double-edged sword effect of spreading the virus even more rapidly than when the pandemic began. Thus many states that had reopened the doors of many businesses too quickly ended up with virus cases spiking almost over night. Queue the issue we are now dealing with where the discussion is being held for many states to shut everything down again.
California’s theaters, despite being told they would be able to open sooner than they had originally anticipated, had a lot of issues to sort through. Not just Californian theaters, but numerous other theaters nationwide have had the issue of opening their doors with no new content to show the customers that walk through their doors. This is how we have ended up with the major theater chains delaying their reopenings nationwide so that they can both reopen all theaters at once and have new films to show. Unfortunately, the new delays due to spikes in the virus cases has even further pushed back the opening dates for these theaters. Now it seems that this might just be for the best as discussions are in place all over the country as to whether each state affected harshly will shut down again.
California seems to be the first state to reach a decision as Governor Newsom recently announced that the state will be going back to its shelter-in-place rules. This means that all businesses that are considered non-essential will be closing their doors to the public once again and it will probably be a long while before they reopen. This just goes to show that things are getting so bad that the worst is starting to come back and businesses are going to suffer. There is no word as to whether this will affect the reopening of the theater chains due to it interfering with reopening plans, but it is safe to say this shut-down will probably not be the only one. Thus, it can also be safe to say that theaters will probably be shut down for awhile longer as it just isn’t a good idea to open any time soon.