![]() “People want to be secure about who’s at the theater.”Īnd most theaters, he added, will maintain staggered showtimes to allow for cleaning between screenings and to keep guests comfortable-no more shoving your way past departing moviegoers to get to your seat, at least for the time being. “It’s become very, very, very popular,” Moritz said. They’ve been lucrative: AMC hosted more than 150,000 such showings in 2020, as has Cinemark through February of this year, and half of Alamo Drafthouse’s revenue during the height of the pandemic came from such a program. But do expect the private auditorium rentals that theaters began offering during the pandemic to stick around. Theaters will be more private.ĭon’t expect virtual screenings to continue outside of smaller indie venues. Making every step of the theatergoing experience as contactless as possible has made it even easier to give customers what they’re ultimately looking for these days: “that sparkling-clean environment,” Zoradi said. Alamo Drafthouse did the same, adding to its app the feature to order food in advance. Mark Zoradi, the CEO of the global theater chain Cinemark, told me that launching “ Snacks in a Tap,” a program that allows moviegoers to order concessions online, was one of the company’s priorities in 2020. Paperless ticketing and online seat reservations were becoming common, but the shutdown provided the opportunity to fine-tune such services. You probably noticed that major cineplexes were moving in a digital direction long before the pandemic. Moviegoing, simply put, is hoping to meet your post-pandemic needs. “What we did during our downtime is … spend our energy on things that are going to move us forward and improve the experience of coming to the cinema,” Tim League, the founder of Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas, a Texas-based chain, told me. Because a return to pre-pandemic habits isn’t enough, industry executives told me they’ve been spending this past year rethinking the role of theaters in the first place. To survive beyond the pandemic, theaters must persuade moviegoers not just to come back, but to come back more frequently than they did-to start thinking of their local cinema as akin to their favorite coffee shop. Still, one film’s success isn’t proof of an entire industry’s resurgence. Milt Moritz, the president of the National Association of Theatre Owners of California and Nevada, agreed: “This is the light at the end of the tunnel we were looking forward to for well over a year.” Seeing sold-out showings, even at limited capacity, is a “promising sign,” Seth Parsley, a general manager of a UEC Theatre in the South, told me over email. Kong, the CGI-drenched monster mash, drew $48.5 million at the box office its first week. Major chains such as Cineworld, the U.K.-based owner of Regal Cinemas, have renegotiated how long films will be shown in theaters before going online, and Godzilla vs. ![]() Theaters have been slowly reopening across the country-rehiring employees, introducing new cleaning standards, and installing top-of-the-line ventilation systems according to industry-wide guidelines. Now, as vaccination rates climb and film-release dates hold firm (for the moment), the industry appears ready to heal. ![]() Read: Hollywood’s patience is frustrating-but necessary After earning a record $42.3 billion in 2019, the global box office tumbled a whopping 72 percent last year. The COVID-19 pandemic forced indoor-viewing suspensions, Hollywood’s biggest studios delayed their most anticipated titles, and theatrical windows shrank-or disappeared altogether-to accommodate the boom in streaming services. Of course, 2020 put that declaration to the test. “There’s no way one can say theatrical is dead,” Deadline observed of the year to come. Viewers were promised a slew of surefire hits, including a new Christopher Nolan thriller, Daniel Craig’s last outing as James Bond, and the next era of Marvel movies. Seemingly every major Hollywood studio was pursuing its own cinematic universe, and every big-budget film was seeking a sequel. When 2020 began, the future of movie theaters looked bright.
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