Mid-January Weekend For Chinese Box Office Weighs In At $47 Million
By George Robbins
From March of last year, we had to start dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic which has been plaguing the world even longer than the pandemic has been on for thus far. Ever since the beginning of the pandemic, things have become extremely difficult for businesses to continue functioning the way that they always have before. This has led to various businesses changing their way of functioning to try and make revenue at a time where this has become much more difficult. Primarily, what many businesses have had to deal with is the fact that they needed to bring people back in if they could, and if not, how could they get their services or goods to people at home. For many businesses, this was something that could be dealt with in some capacity, but other types of businesses were not so lucky, like movie theaters.
Movie theaters started suffering from the moment the pandemic first began because they thrive entirely on getting people to come into their establishments. They aren’t the only business which functions this way, but they are among the few businesses that don’t have alternatives for them to function properly. Places like restaurants don’t really have to be open to the public in order to function thanks to the advent and rapid expansion of delivery services which the restaurant may not even have to pay for. Thus, it remains that only entertainment businesses really have to worry about not having a revenue stream of some kind and among those businesses are movie theaters as mentioned earlier. Movie theaters spent a long time without getting any kind of revenue whatsoever, and even though they are starting to get some now, it isn’t what they once used to get.
Despite the fact that many movie theaters are once again open to the public for business, the fact remains that they are not functional in the same way that they were pre-pandemic. This means that they have a long way to go before they can get back to the same level of functionality that they were at from before, and that is assuming that the pandemic ends sooner rather than later. Not everything is as terrible as people think though because, as previously mentioned, theaters are starting to at least get some kind of business again. The downside is that a large majority of said business is the severely reduced crowds which are going out to theaters which only earns theaters that little bit of money they’ve been hoping for. For the best example of how badly things are seeming to be in the movie theater industry, we can take a close look at the industry over in China.
Movie theater companies and production studios often make the vast majority of their money from the fact that there is such a large population over in China. This is why many companies often try their absolute best just to appeal to Chinese audiences, because they know that this is where a vast majority of their international ticket sales are coming from. China reopened theaters a little while back at this point just like the theaters around the world and it hasn’t really been paying off for anyone because people haven’t been going out. Now that the vaccine is beginning to be distributed, people are starting to become much more confident in going back out in public so movie theaters are starting to get some business back once again. Unfortunately, the amount of business they are trying to get back is not really enough to keep the economy for theaters alive and well, but it is better than nothing at all.
Usually, when a new year begins, there is a lot of buzz going around movie theaters and they often end up bringing in a lot of money since the holidays just passed. This year is very much different from the usual though because the pandemic is still going and therefore, even though theaters should have brought in possibly hundreds of millions this past weekend, they only brought in about $42 million this past weekend. This is the gross amount brought in by the entire Chinese box office and thus, it just goes to show that things are nowhere near great as people were hoping for. Needless to say, the entire movie industry is still hoping that we will soon see the end of this pandemic and they can all once again start making back their money to some degree. Though even then, it may still be awhile before things start to swing back to the way they once were before all of this began.