Up to 5000 Chinese Movie Theaters May Shut Down
By George Robbins
Ever since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, movie theaters have been in a lot of trouble since they were forced to shut their doors to the public. In an effort to keep the rate of infection from rising even more than it already was, they closed their doors. This, combined with the fact theater productions have been shut down has resulted in their being a lack of support for the industry to some degree. Theaters have no way of making income and even when they do actually to reopen their doors, the amount of income they bring in will be severely reduced from what they were getting before.
Many theaters in the United States will be reopening by the summer in order to try and get back some of the business that has been lost due to the pandemic. When those theaters actually do reopen, they will have to follow guidelines to keep people from getting infected including reducing overall capacity. In order to reduce overall capacity and ensure that people are actually keeping distance from one another, they won’t be able to sell as many seats as they’d like. On top of not being allowed to sell all of their tickets, they will run into the immediate problem of having almost no new movies to debut to the public. Since this is a major selling point for theaters, this presents a massive issue for those businesses.
Theaters over in China are starting to see the effects of this just soon after reopening many of their doors. As we know by this point, China is the center point of where this outbreak began and it means that they had to shut down many of their businesses before the worldwide pandemic was even announced. Not too long ago, some theaters there attempted to reopen their doors to the public, but almost immediately had to close them again because there were so few moviegoers. The risk of infection coupled with the lack of a good reason for people to even go to the movies in the first place resulted in theaters not being able to stay opened. It appears as though this issue is starting to present itself again with some theaters trying to reopen their doors.
With the pandemic situation being as fluid as it is, the possibility that theaters will be able to remain open for long periods of time seems unlikely. Until there are more good reasons for people to go out to the movies than there are bad ones, theaters will just keep losing money. By the time new movies will actually release, the amount of money that will have been lost will be too much for theater owners to handle. It is estimated that due to this financial loss, there could be a permanent closing of over 5000 different theaters throughout all of China. While unknown if something similar may happen in other countries, it is probably a good guess to say that this sort of thing will likely happen all over the world.