Boxoffice Pro Q1 2021

EXHIBITORS HAVE THEIR SAY
What’s your biggest takeaway from 2020?
5
CINEMASAFE
August
As soon as cinemas went dark
in March, the industry’s focus
turned to reopening. A crucial
part of that step was developing
and instituting an industrywide
set of guidelines and best
practices to mitigate the spread
of Covid-19 in cinemas.
That effort culminated
in August with the launch
of CinemaSafe, a NATOled
initiative to establish a
voluntary set of protocols
based on World Health
Organization, Centers
for Disease Control, and
Occupational Safety and
Health Administration
guidelines, in consultation
with leading epidemiologists.
More than 370 companies,
representing over 33,000
screens in North America,
signed up for the program
at launch. The CinemaSafe
protocols include provisions
for mask enforcement inside
auditoriums, social distancing,
reduced capacity, air filtration,
modified concessions
sales, mobile ticketing, and
enhanced cleaning and
disinfection measures for
employees. The CinemaSafe
logo became a fixture of
pandemic-era moviegoing,
informing and easing the first
wave of moviegoers returning
to theaters.
“The biggest impact this year
to all of us was the disruption
of our normal business by
the Covid pandemic. It
was a systemic shock to
the entire entertainment
industrial complex. The
March shutdown closed
movie theaters, canceled
concerts, shuttered theme
parks, and stopped film and
TV production. For movie
theaters it killed momentum
built by the first 11 weeks of
2020, where pictures like
Bad Boys for Life, 1917, and
Sonic the Hedgehog were
overperforming. In a perfect
example of the Newtonian
Laws of Audience Dynamics,
an audience in motion
was acted upon by that
other force and completely
stopped.
“But it’s not like they
stopped watching filmed
entertainment. Oh, no,
people still watched. The
biggest beneficiaries of the
Covid theater crisis were the
alphabet streaming soup
of Amazon, Netflix, Apple,
Disney Plus, Hulu, HBO Max,
and Peacock. They were
already competing with
movie theaters for audiences
and original productions
before Covid. The pandemic
shutdown only accelerated
that trend. With no theaters
to show their films, studios
did what they always do.
They made decisions in their
own self-interest and found
other ways to monetize their
movies. Darwin would have
been proud. Some studios,
like Paramount and Sony,
sold off releases to streaming
services. Others, like Disney
and Warner Bros., used the
disruption to feed what were
once theatrical releases to
their proprietary streaming
outlets. Universal’s Covid
strategy was to recalculate
the theatrical window. Now,
10 months into the pandemic,
theaters are still facing
forced health closures, and
audiences are gathering
around the watercooler
talking about ‘The Queen’s
Gambit,’ ‘Bridgerton,’ ‘The
Crown,’ ‘The Undoing,’ and
other streaming series.
Sometime in 2021, exhibition
will awake from its Rip Van
Winkle slumber to a different
landscape. Only time will tell
as to its ultimate effect. As
the stuttering effort to turn
vaccines into vaccinations
ramps up, a cloud will lift
over all of us. The biggest
takeaway is that people still
want stories. Soon they will
be able to experience them
again on our big screens.”
Jeffrey Kaufman
SVP Film and Marketing
Malco Theatres
m
Q1 2021
53
48-61_Top-10-Moments.indd 53 12/02/2021 12:33