A month after their reopening, without blockbusters and with two-thirds empty theaters, cinemas have three times fewer spectators but still want to believe in it. With attendance which could exceed the one million weekly spectators mark on Wednesday, Marc-Olivier Sebbag, general delegate of the National Federation of French Cinemas (FNCF), hopes to cross “a considerable milestone”, although it remains insufficient: it is three times less than normal.
At the Cinémascop Mégarama in Garat, in Charente, as in hundreds of cinemas in France, the operator Aurélie Delage makes a face. “I no longer look at the figures” but “it shouldn’t last,” explains this manager, who no longer meets her expenses. “People have been inside during confinement, they want to be in the open air, at the bar or in the restaurant, especially since the weather is good,” she notes.
The summer of 2019 and its crowds of families who came to see The Lion King are a distant memory. Like others, Ms. Delage has even considered closing, but clinging to attendance that shudders from week to week, she sheds the idea: “it would be catastrophic, the public needs benchmarks”.
As in the rest of France, the cinema in Garat lacks “locomotives”, big releases, mostly American, likely to draw the crowds. “The cinemas, at European level, want American studios to derogate from the system of world releases”, and release their blockbusters “in the summer” on the Old Continent, without waiting for the reopening of theaters on the other side of the Atlantic, explains Sebbag. Will they be heard? “It is a hope, a request …”, he adds.
In the meantime, operators have learned this week the indefinite postponement of a film they are waiting for like Messiah, the latest Christopher Nolan, “Tenet”, scheduled first in July, then for August 12.
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