Moviegoers wait for their movie to start at the AMC Burbank in Burbank, Calif. on reopening day in March 2021.
Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images
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Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images
As good as Hollywood is at imagining alternate realities, it didn’t see this one coming.
The first weekend in March 2020, as Pixar’s Onward joined Sonic the Hedgehog, The Invisible Man, and Bad Boys For Life at cineplexes, North American cinemas had a snappy $100 million weekend. Two weeks later, a much-diminished Tinseltown reported that its weekend ticket sales, according to the industry tracking site Box Office Mojo, amounted to $4,160.
That’s not a typo.
What came in-between was COVID-19, an illness spread by proximity – the very thing that makes moviegoing a popular experience. In the space of a few days most American cinemas had shuttered, and the ones that remained open – mostly drive-ins – were so sparsely attended they were barely making payroll.
It would be months before major theater chains reopened, and when they did, movie-going was no longer the carefree leisure-time activity it had been. In some places, attending a film at the end of 2020 involved masks, temperature scans at the door, contact-free ticketing.
I know all this because I wrote about it. I had to, with Hollywood not releasing new films to theaters. That year’s presumed blockbusters – the 007 thriller No Time to Die, Marvel’s Black Widow, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story – all pushed their openings to 2021.
So for a while, I wrote about films movie-lovers could catch at home: Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals, Harold and Maude, Do The Right Thing, silent classics starring Buster Keaton.
Then, I wrote about industry strategies — how studios were releasing films to video on demand, or streaming services, while filmmakers were figuring out how to make movies without endangering casts or crews.
The marquee at the Plaza Theatre in Atlanta in September 2020.
Christopher Escobar/Plaza Theatre
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