AS the Corvid 19 virus continues to wreak havoc on the world, many of its impacts are barely starting. Cities that should be hopping with Comicons, state basketball tourneys, collegiate sports of all sorts now give off the feeling of ghost towns. Schools, sports and every aspect of life appears to be shut down for the foreseeable future, but what about the movie industry? Could this be the summer where theaters nation wide shut down? What if this is a summer of no movies?
Summer Without Movies: Whole Lotta Nothin’
If it wasn’t released in theaters before the virus hit, chances are the movie will not see a release date any time in the near future. To date the following movies abandoned their release dates:
No Time To Die (007), A Quiet Place II, Peter Rabbit II, Fast & Furious 9, The Lovebirds, Blue Story, The Artist’s Wife, The Truth, Mulan, New Mutants, and Antlers.
A few set later release dates, but many simply cancelled their release date and sit in limbo. They might release later this year or next. In the case of New Mutants, maybe never.
Say It Ain’t So Red!
In fact most major studios watch tow movies to see if they flinch or hold tight to their release dates. Trolls World Tour looks to release April 10th. Should trolls move that means the next major release will not happen until May 1.
Black Widow is supposed to release then, but if that should pull up stakes and move its release date, there will not be a major release in theaters until mid May or later! The decision on what to do with Red, holds massive repercussions to the movie industry. Without her, we may have a summer with no movie – AT ALL!
Summer Without Movies: Will Theaters Shut Down?
For a short term, theaters can run special showings of older movies or simply choose to eat the loss for a month, but where an old showing of something like Top Gun or Labyrinth will sell out a couple screens, the revenue they generate pales in comparison to a summer blockbuster capable of selling out multiple screens for a weekend or more.
If Black Widow up and moves, we may see theater chains close either in part or entirely for much of the summer. If there are no new movies to show, there simply will not be enough revenue to justify keeping the doors open. Many don’t realize how little theaters get out of that $10-15 ticket. Their cut is rather small.
Smallest Box Office on Record?
The box office itself stood an insurmountable test of matching last year’s ticket receipts. In a year with no Harry Potter, Star Wars, Avengers, etc, 2020 was all but guaranteed it would finish less than 2020. Now you take away the early summer box office and this could be one of the worst x office totals in movie history.
As it stands, this past weekends box office only drew in $53 million. This is a 47% drop from the previous week, and with Mulan now gone, theaters will lose out on an easy $200 million weekend.
Let us hope the fear and Virus fade quickly because if they don’t, we could have a summer without movies.
