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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

CNet [cnet.com]:

thanks to mass closings [usatoday.com] and skyrocketing debt [forbes.com] for theater franchises during COVID-19 [cnet.com], 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.
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Subscriptions to traditional cineplexes

Sure, companies like AMC hated the super cheap subscription-based app Moviepass [cnet.com], 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.
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More drive-ins
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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.
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A tech-giant takeover

How exactly this will look remains to be seen, but tech and streaming giants like Apple, Amazon and Netflix have either considered [medium.com] buying theaters or already committed to doing so [wired.co.uk]. 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, they could serve beer.

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