U.K. Won’t Open Theaters Before July
States and other countries have started making plans to re-open their businesses. Due to the pandemic, many public businesses had to shut down in order to avoid spreading the coronavirus to even more people. Among the first businesses to shut down were movie theaters for obvious reasons. With everyone being forced to stay a certain distance apart from one another, theaters were forced to shut their doors, while some theaters did so willingly before the order was put in place. These theaters are now in the middle of trying to figure out when the right time is to re-open their doors.
Theater chains such as AMC, Cinemark, and Regal shut down before the orders to do so came in. They all decided to re-open their doors to the public some time during the summer regardless of what other theaters do. Some states have started allowing theaters to re-open, but with very heavy restrictions and many theaters have chosen to wait until the chains re-open as well. When chains re-open, then it is possible people will end up visiting all theaters since they will have more confidence in those businesses as a whole.
Other countries have also started discussing plans for re-opening their businesses to the public and how they plan are starting that process. Similar to here in the States, when businesses abroad re-open their doors to the public, they will have a lot of restrictions. Things like the social distancing aspect, cleaning everything down after it’s been used, making sure people wear gloves and masks, and temperatures being monitored must be followed. Without these rules in place businesses aren’t allowed to re-open. Even when theaters do re-open, like in China, they may not have any business walking in due to the public being wary of public places.
Theaters in China ended up closing almost immediately after they opened due to the public being generally too afraid to risk going out to the movies. The United Kingdom was trying to come up with a timeline for when they would re-open businesses, theaters included. They are following a model similar to the one being used in California. Over the next few months, they will be re-opening businesses in order of which ones are least at risk for spreading the virus. Since numbers of newly infected cases have gone down, governments want to keep those numbers down. The government in the U.K. deems theaters highly at risk just like in the state of California, so they plan on waiting until at least July 4th before allowing any to re-open to the public.