Regal Cinemas Once Again Shutting Their Doors to the Public
By George Robbins
As we have all become aware of by now, movie theaters are in kind of a rough patch due to the pandemic and it appears it will not be dissipating any time soon. This is something that theaters have had no choice but to deal with ever since the pandemic first began and it has greatly affected their revenue stream. In fact, they have not really had a revenue stream since this all began and it has resulted in a lot of issues for the movie industry as a whole. Movie theaters were looking for the longest time for a proper re-opening window to reopen their doors and show films and they eventually found that window.
Unfortunately for theaters, that window was still too close to the start of the pandemic, despite being months after it all began. No matter how much time passes, without a vaccine people will not want to go out to the movies. For the public at large, there is just too much of a risk involved with going out too the movies as theaters are easily one of the most potentially devastating areas for the spread of disease. People have been saying that while theaters have been opened, there have been no cases linked back to them. The easy counter-point to that is the fact that of course there wouldn’t be any cases because no one is going to them.
Theaters have restrictions in place to help in the effort of preventing people from contracting the virus such as limited capacity and a mask requirement. These two things can help tremendously, but there is still the issue that many people just don’t care and aren’t following those mandates out of petty spite. So although these rules will work if followed properly, there are sure to be cases because of people who don’t follow those rules. If people are not generally going out to movie theaters, then there is nothing to worry about as of course their would be no cases. Theater chains were hoping that they would at least be able to drum up some kind of business though recently.
Most theater chains decided that the middle of August was going to be a good time for them to reopen their doors to the public. When they had to shut their doors to the public back in the middle of March, no one had any idea how long businesses were going to be shut down for. What followed was an extended period of time where certain types of businesses were slowly given the greenlight to open their doors back up again. Theater chains were among the types of businesses that were given the go-ahead the latest of all and so they were finally able to come up with reopening dates. Those dates, of course, were centered around the release dates of movies put out by studios and vice versa.
The movie that we saw take the spotlight was one ‘Tenet‘ which is Christopher Nolan’s newest original blockbuster film. The idea was that the movie would actually end up serving as a method of getting people back into theaters. Since Christopher Nolan films are known by audiences to be experiences that they should not miss out on, theater owners were pushing the movie’s release pretty hard along with Warner Bros. Plenty of mystery surrounded the film as people were curious about what the plot would be about as the general public saw trailers filled with espionage and time manipulation. The movie released first internationally and then one week later it released domestically and while it did not make a killing, it certainly did well considering the current social climate.
For the first week, the movie did fairly well, but for the next few weeks it didn’t do so hot domestically. ‘Tenet’ has only been making a few million per week on the domestic market which is problematic for both theaters and the studio. Although the title is still doing fairly well in the international market, the domestic market has pretty much been a dud for the movie. This has presented a number of problems because it made everyone realize that people are not willing to take the risk to go out and see movies right now. Studios heavily rely upon the domestic market and Warner Bros. knew that, so when they realized what was happening they decided to delay most of their films.
Many may not know that Warner Bros. actually needs to make somewhere around $500 million to break even before marketing costs on ‘Tenet.’ They only just recently hit around $300 million because of the international market and this has shown just how volatile the industry is at the moment. As such, Warner Bros. took the opportunity to learn from this failure and pushed back many of their upcoming releases which essentially changed their entire line-up. Many of their DC films actually ended up being severely pushed back as a result of this. The main reason for these massive delays is because they decided to push back their upcoming reboot of the movie ‘Dune’ by almost an entire year.
Now that Warner Bros. has confirmed the changed release dates of many of their upcoming titles, theaters have had a lot to think about. They have already been broaching the topic of possibly shutting down again because after the failed domestic ‘Tenet’ release, many studios started doing the same thing as Warner did. Now that there are essentially no movies coming out, Regal Cinemas has made the announcement that they will be shutting their doors again for the foreseeable future. There is no telling how long they will be shut down again, but we now know that this Thursday, October 8th, they will be shutting down all of their theaters. If this is any kind of indication of things to come, we should expect similar closings for other theaters soon.