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Movie theaters will look vastly different if they survive COVID-19:
thanks to mass closings and skyrocketing debt for theater franchises during COVID-19, the future of the businesses that offered me so much comfort as a teen is in peril. In uncertain times, one thing seems increasingly clear: The theater industry must change to survive. Here's how movie theaters might look in the future.
[...] Sure, companies like AMC hated the super cheap subscription-based app Moviepass, but the subscription model is an increasingly popular and time-tested method of ensuring revenue -- some theaters in the UK have been using such services for more than a decade.
[...] Drive-in theaters, which thrived in the '50s and early '60s, are already finding a second (or third) life amid the pandemic, thanks to the built-in social distancing and -- for the reason many of them still survived before COVID-19 -- nostalgia.
[...] How exactly this will look remains to be seen, but tech and streaming giants like Apple, Amazon and Netflix have either considered buying theaters or already committed to doing so. While wholesale corporate takeovers are probably a long shot, Silicon Valley has the capital to buy out floundering theater franchises and incorporate them into their existing integrative business models -- and doing so could dramatically reorient the movie theater landscape.
Or, more of them could serve food and beer like Alamo Drafthouse Cinema.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday June 19 2020, @11:07PM
Post quarantine there seems to be a false sense of "its the only thing open" so the nuts really come out of the woodwork. Will likely settle down later as people get used to other things being open.
Locally the "cool thing" is to get drunk and into fights at a chuck e cheese which has a liquor license, but that's still closed (locally? everywhere?) so those folks went to the drive in, etc.