‘The Empire Strikes Back’ Will Top Box Office for First Time in Two Decades
By George Robbins
Although theaters are still mostly shut down all over the nation due to the coronavirus pandemic, there are many privately owned theaters that are open to the public. Movie theater chains have yet to reopen because they see no point in doing so due to it being such a monumental effort and because of the currently high risk social climate right now. Due to the reopening of many different public places nationwide, there was a very rapid growth in the number of new cases that we were seeing pop up all over. This brings with it the possibility that we will businesses start to shut down again in an effort to curb the growing numbers. This risk is a big reason why the main theater chains don’t want their doors reopened just yet, while the bigger reason is that they have no new content to show to the public.
Movies have had no choice but to be delayed due to the aforementioned spike in new Covid-19 cases that is currently sweeping across a majority of the nation. Studios don’t want to take the risk that they would be repeating the start of the pandemic; releasing movies and then having to pull them out of theaters way too early and put them up for sale on a digital format. One of the films meant to release in the middle of July, ‘Tenet,’ was moved back to almost the middle of August despite some protest from the movie’s director. This was a push deemed necessary by the studio and other companies have taken similar steps with Disney even moving back their upcoming live-action version of ‘Mulan.’ Thus, most theaters have decided not to open their doors until at least the end of July.
Theaters that have been opened up already haven’t really had much success in drawing in the biggest of crowds, but dedicated moviegoers are still going there. At this point, not having anything to do at home is the worst thing for some people and they have to get out of the house. Thanks to a few new services from Fandango, they are managing to find theaters near them that are open and they can see what restrictions they have in place. This has given people an opportunity to try and safely get out of the house and see movies that they may not have seen in awhile. At this point, theaters really only have older movies to show and it is not so great for the bottom line of these businesses. That being said, theaters have managed to get the box office up and running again.
The Box Office has pretty much been shut down since the pandemic began and theaters shut their doors to the public. With no earnings to report, they were essentially shut down until recently when some theaters domestically managed to reopen their doors. This has resulted in ticket sales for older movies, bringing them back into the spotlight after so many years. The amount of money being brought in is low as one would expect given the situation, but there is something instead of nothing, so some people are happy. Not too long ago, ‘Jurassic Park’ made its way back to the top of the box office from its initial 1993 release and now it seems ‘Star Wars: Episode V- The Empire Strikes Back’ has taken the seat on the throne. ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ stood at the top of the box office domestically with around 400k to 500k in ticket sales for the first time in two decades because theaters needed something to show the public.