Will movie theaters disappear?

The film industry calibrates its future in Las Vegas (USA) with the return of CinemaCon, the most important business fair on the big screen and which arrives at a very delicate time with theaters mired in questions by the pandemic and the growing offer for “streaming”.

After canceling its 2020 edition due to the coronavirus, CinemaCon returns to the city of gaming and will host owners of theaters, studios, distributors and other major business players in the film industry from Monday to Thursday.

The National Association of Cinema Owners (NAT), the organizer of Cinema-Amb, has insisted that this edition will comply with all security measures for coronavirus.

However, the expansion of the delta variant shook CinemaCon, as Disney, the absolute dominator of cinema by now, announced in late July that the convention would be skipped because of its doubts about the situation. of the pandemic.

A domino effect was feared from the rest of the studios, but eventually NAT will have in its programming with very important studios in Hollywood such as Warner Bros., Sony, Universal and Paramount.

An existential crisis

After a 2020 of closed doors and dilapidated accounts, cinemas expected 2021 to be the year of recovery, theaters operating at full capacity thanks to vaccines, and “blockbusters” back on the release schedule.

This has not been the case as box office collections are still far from pre-pandemic figures, studios do not want to launch their blockbusters in a very volatile market, and the traditional display model is more in doubt than ever.

“The pandemic has been the biggest existential crisis in the history of the film industry,” NAT President John Fithian told The Hollywood Reporter on Friday.

The exceptional situation of the pandemic caused the studies to resort to emergency measures that altered the previously sacred distribution windows, which is the term that goes from the exhibition in rooms to the arrival of the tapes in homes.

Thus, many films were released directly on the Internet, studios such as Warner Bros. resorted to hybrid releases on theaters and platforms (HBO Max, in this case) and others such as Disney offered movies for “streaming” but with a premium access (“Black Widow,” for example, cost an additional $ 30 for Disney + users).

All of these ideas have served to alleviate some of Hollywood’s enormous crisis.

But the question everyone is asking now, and one that will surely be debated at CinemaCon, is whether this model has been just a patch for the coronavirus or whether it has come to stay.

“We think these are models for the pandemic era (…). We should go back to normal premiere models already,” said Fithian, who as a representative of cinemas in the US doesn’t even want to hear about a future in which the exclusivity and primacy of the rooms ends.

Nor among the proponents of a more streaming-oriented Hollywood are days of wine and roses.

Here is the example of Disney, which will be seen in the courts no more and no less than with Scarlett Johansson for the profit sharing of “Black Widow” in a clear background of the lawsuits that may arise for the money coming through the digital market.

The answers to all of these Hollywood dilemmas are complex and very difficult to predict, but perhaps some of them will be known in the coming days at CinemaCon.