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posted by martyb on Friday June 19 2020, @07:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the netflix-n-chill dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @04:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @04:42PM (#1010411)

    Even though we are on the decline we are still in the first wave of the virus. And in my area people are still not allowed to have in-seat dining, but are allowed to eat in tents outside. And people are flocking to them.

    Although the movie theatre business may be dying (I take Roscoe's comments above as very persuasive), the vast majority of people who are being extremely cautious will take no precautions a year from now. If the short term doesn't kill it they will be back and people will be stupid enough to go back to sitting elbow-to-elbow, sneezing into shirtsleeves right next to somebody else, and not even beginning to realize how much they are exposing themselves to the microorganisms divested by others.

    The vast majority of the mob is stupid and does not learn and will only do things differently when absolutely forced to.