The approval of the reopening protocol has already been announced, so it would only be necessary for the Executive Power to annul its last decree for the cinemas to operate again.
January 27, 2021 09.00
Cinemas have been closed for ten months since isolation was declared and then DISPO, with the exception of Cordoba, which reopened in January. Added to the uncertainty due to the lack of income is a possible apocalypse for the business due to simultaneous streaming premieres. Are there prospects for 2021?
The checkerboard
The approval of the reopening protocol has already been announced, so it would only be necessary for the Executive Power to annul its last decree for the cinemas to operate again. Both chambers (CAEM? Large chains? And FADEC? SMEs?) Agreed to a capacity of 50% with a free row in front of and behind each spectator, in addition to two unoccupied seats at their sides. The objective for 2021 is that it does not cause us loss, says Gabriel Feldman, head of Multiplex.
Sunken locker
From the record 50.3 million tickets sold in 2015, the box office plummeted 11.3% in the next three years to 44.6 million in 2018. But even that number today sounds positive for entrepreneurs in the film industry if one takes into account that theaters closed 2020 with only 8.6 million tickets cut, according to Ultracine.
The most-watched movie of the year, which only had two and a half months of actual operation, was Frozen 2, with 2,080,000 viewers, closely followed by Theft of the Century. Is there room for the rooms? The decision of certain large production companies to release their tanks in streaming and movie theaters at the same time caused the owners of the main complexes to cry out in the United States. And in Argentina they were not left behind. Killing the theater window is a mistake because it was always an important part of the production billing chain.
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We understand that it is an extreme emergency situation, but it can mean a sentence of disappearance for many rooms, says Feldman. More for love than business The drive-ins were more of a maneuver to regain contact with the public. Several channels screened well-known films to, somehow, return to activity. At the business level it did not work. It did not serve as a palliative, a businessman acknowledges. To look towards 2021, they express from the industry, they need to open. Only when we define what the return to theaters will be like and what will happen to the films, there we will have some visibility, they say from a large chain.
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