How COVID-19 is still impacting movies – and theaters

As good as Hollywood is at imagining alternate realities, it didn’t see this one coming.

The first weekend in March 2020, as Pixar’s Onward joined Sonic the Hedgehog, The Invisible Man, and Bad Boys For Life at cineplexes, North American cinemas had a snappy $100 million weekend. Two weeks later, a much-diminished Tinseltown reported that its weekend ticket sales, according to the industry tracking site Box Office Mojo, amounted to $4,160. 

That’s not a typo.

What came in-between was COVID-19, an illness spread by proximity – the very thing that makes moviegoing a popular experience. In the space of a few days most American cinemas had shuttered, and the ones that remained open – mostly drive-ins – were so sparsely attended they were barely making payroll. 

It would be months before major theater chains reopened, and when they did, movie-going was no longer the carefree leisure-time activity it had been. In some places, attending a film at the end of 2020 involved masks, temperature scans at the door, contact-free ticketing.

I know all this because I wrote about it. I had to, with Hollywood not releasing new films to theaters. That year’s presumed blockbusters – the 007 thriller No Time to Die, Marvel’s Black Widow, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story – all pushed their openings to 2021.

Then, I wrote about industry strategies — how studios were releasing films to video on demand, or streaming services, while filmmakers were figuring out how to make movies without endangering casts or crews.

Filmmaker Mark Duplass teamed up with actress and director Natalie Morales to make the two-hander Language Lessons about an unexpected friendship between a woman who teaches Spanish online and a man whose husband has purchased 100 lessons for him as a surprise. The premise allowed them to film without ever being in the same room.

The film How It Ends took a different tack, filming its story of an impending asteroid collision largely outdoors, in a spookily — if understandably — deserted Los Angeles.

As summer arrived, and theaters had to either reopen or face bankruptcy, new issues arose. In August, I attended a critics’ screening for Christopher Nolan’s time-bending thriller Tenet, joining six other reviewers spaced as far from each other as possible in a 450-seat IMAX house. I remember thinking that this couldn’t seriously be the model for the future.

And indeed, when theaters showed the film, some with seating in checkerboard patterns that limited attendance to one-tenth of capacity, Tenet took in $20 million over the long Labor Day weekend — easily the highest box office number in five months, but far from what was needed to break even for a film that had cost hundreds of millions to make and market.

He wasn’t wrong. Five years after the biggest attendance drop in cinematic history, Hollywood is still struggling to climb back from the depths. This year’s first nine weeks of ticket sales in North America ($1.09 billion) are an improvement over last year, but they’re still running well behind the pre-COVID weeks of 2020 ($1.67 billion).

Onward, as that Pixar title had it back in March 2020, and hopefully, upward.