Recent coronavirus case spikes, new lockdowns and the expectation of minimal family outings during the holidays has turned a year of bad news for the country’s cinemas into an outlook that’s simply bleak, Bloomberg News reported. In early October, when Regal Cinemas shuttered all 500-plus locations nationwide, that darkened more than 7,000 screens alone. The industry has already seen a cinema cull in the U.S., per the National Association of Theatre Owners, with the number of movie theaters shrinking from around 7,200 in 1996 to roughly 5,500 as of late 2019. But that may just be a preview. John Fithian, head of the National Association of Theatre Owners, told Variety that unless Congress passes the Save Our Stages Act, a bipartisan push to support concert venues and theaters that have seen their businesses decimated by Covid, “probably around 70% of our mid- and small-sized members will either confront bankruptcy reorganization or the likelihood of going out of business entirely by sometime in January.” In past economic downturns, theater owners tried stunts like “dish nights” — giving away different pieces of a table setting, such as a saucer or salad plate, to lure Great Depression patrons. That probably won’t work this time, leaving a lot of moviegoing real estate in need of a reboot. There’s a long tradition of adaptive reuse when it comes to the older generation of neighborhood moviehouses, many of which died off in the second half of the 20th century as new suburban multiplexes appeared. These smaller facilities often see a second life as community theaters, churches, gyms and bookstores. But modern multiplexes can be poor candidates for adaptive reuse, theater owners and real-estate experts told the Wall Street Journal, because of their sloped floors and subdivided spaces. That’s especially true at a time when the malls they are often attached to are struggling reinvent themselves. Closed theaters may fare better on the real estate market as available land in need of a demolition; a shuttered Regal Theater in North Charleston, S.C., for example, was simply demolished, with plans to build an apartment building in its place. Some developers do see sequel potential in modern movie theaters, though. Last year, PMB, a development firm focused on the medical field, turned a 1980’s multiplex in Goodyear, Arizona, into a collection of medical offices. And Walter Crutchfield, co-founder and partner of the Arizona development firm Vintage Partners, turned a Flagstaff movie theater into perhaps the country’s most creative department of motor vehicles.
