“Even if you want to watch Tenet, you don’t know if you have COVID and you don’t know if the people around you do either. So why push it?”
When will you feel safe returning to movie theaters? Cinemas are praying it’s sooner rather than later: The largest theater chain in the world, AMC, reported second-quarter losses of $2.2 billion, and studios willing to brave cinema releases during the pandemic are seeing meager box office openings compared to the same period last year. But whether the industry can manage to bounce back depends on moviegoers’ fear of contracting Covid-19 in the process, according to writer Will Leitch, who argues, “We have all been forced to make short-term decisions that will lead to unforeseen but negative long-term consequences.” One of those consequences could be the movie theater industry “roiled, upended and possibly destroyed” by pandemic fear, which means that even if our fear eventually subsides, there may not be theaters left to visit.
