Since 2019, more than 3,000 movie theaters have closed in the United States with numbers still declining. Four years later, is it still justifiable to blame the pandemic for the lack of attendance, or are streaming websites taking over Hollywood?
The pandemic ended up stopping almost everything in the US, including many production studios and, obviously, movie theaters. Later in the pandemic, theaters all over started renting out entire theaters to one party to view a single movie. This did accumulate some revenue, but sales still weren’t keeping up with what they were before.
One of the biggest theater chains in the country, AMC, closed all of their locations in March of 2020. Immediately one of the biggest film-makers in the world, Christopher Nolan, came out with a statement declaring the need to keep movie theaters relevant, but why does Nolan care so much about the theaters when he could possibly be making more money by having it streamed on multiple different servers? In 2020 alone, AMC lost over $4.6 billion dollars because of the screens turning dark.
“When this crisis passes, the need for collective human engagement, the need to live and love and laugh and cry together, will be more powerful than ever,” Nolan told a Washington Post reporter, “We need what movies can offer us.”
Nolan is definitely someone who truly believes that theaters are needed to send the message about the art of filmography. He also truly outdid himself with the job of trying to get more people back into the theaters with “Oppenheimer,” one of the hit movies of 2023.
Don’t worry people living in North America, because we still have many more movie theaters than needed. Infact, a reason why so many people think that movie theaters are falling under is because of the amount of theaters in our area.
In late 2021, there was a 61% decline in sales for all theaters in the US. Streaming platforms have taken over, often creating and/or producing new movies and streaming all movies over their servers.
