What's the latest theatre to close or open you have heard about?

[Harold Hallikainen]

On why someone would buy a Cinema out of bankruptcy, I wonder how profitable a Cinema is before debt service (EBIT)? Buying the assets out of bankruptcy, you don't have the debt service the bankrupt company had, so it could be profitable. It seems like the woes of the big chains are due to too much debt.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

You're right, and AMC had the most debt... not too long ago, but aside from that I am pretty sure a lot of the excess debt theater chains still have was COVID induced.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Speaking of COVID. While no longer declared a pandemic and no longer tracked in the same way... the summer surge is real down here. I just got over my second bout of it, managed to spread it to one of our part time projectionists too before I even had symptoms. I want to blame the summer camp kids that take over our theatre this time of year, but it could have been anything. Last summer the camp wave took out about 3 of the camp counselors.

Hopefully the uptick is not severe enough to keep people out of seats, but I'll applaud anyone choosing to wear a mask right now to attend an indoor event with a bunch of strangers. On the other hand if too many people did it... would probably start to scare away the more cautious people from attending. The optics of it are problematic in Texas, and it shouldn't be.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I'm glad you recovered from your latest bout! I've been tracking "excess deaths" for several years now ( https://hallikainen.org/cv/ ). Currently, the number of deaths per week is running about 10% above the same week in 2017-2019. I attribute this to an aging population. For those born in 1950, the average (might be median) expected lifespan is 68.2 years. 68 years ago, the population was still in the baby boom upswing, so we would expect an increase in the number of deaths 68 years later (now). For example, averaging the number of deaths expected in 2017 through 2019 based on births in 1949 through 1951, we get 3,700,333 expected deaths. For 2024, we can look back 68 years to 1956 and see that there was an increase of 13.8% over the 1949-1951 period. So, we might expect the number of deaths this year to be 13.8% above the 2017-2019 period. Currently, it's running about 10% higher. For the week of January 1, 2021, the deaths were 48% above the same week in 2017-2019.

Between vaccination, natural immunity, and improved treatment, fewer people are dying from COVID (currently).

[Ryan Gallagher]

Between vaccination, natural immunity, and improved treatment, fewer people are dying from COVID (currently).

Thankfully! I blame myself for my recent bout, I did not re-up my vaxx after recovering from covid in Jan23. Now they say wait 4 months and then get the booster again.

My metrics in the US (other than myself or acquaintances catching it), has been to look at the wastewater testing data every so often.
https://www.wastewaterscan.org/en

The CDC also still reports on increases in ER visits and deaths
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tra...tatracker-home

Your +10% figure seems about right for the current upswing.

[Lyle Romer]

I'm not sure how this discussion about COVID ended up in this thread. With respect to moviegoing, nobody really cares how bad the winter flu season is so why, at this point, would anybody really care how bad the summer COVID surge is?

Personally, I have no idea if I've had COVID. It's pretty unlikely that I haven't. If I'm sick I do what I've always done and stay away from other people. If I feel like crap, I don't really care if I have COVID, the flu or a bad cold and therefore have no desire to find out exactly what I have.

After the reactions I had to the vaccine and first booster I do not anticipate ever getting a booster again. The duration was shorter but I felt worse after the vaccine doses than I've felt from any illness over the past 4 years.

At this point, COVID is just another in the long list of annoying illnesses to deal with. Anybody avoiding movie theatres or other gatherings out of fear of becoming infected with it might as well just never leave their home for anything for the rest of their life. I'm somewhat of a germophobe but the COVID pandemic has turned some people into a version of germophobe that makes me look like my behaviors (some of which I've suppressed significantly) are the most rational behaviors possible.

[Bobby Henderson]

I take the COVID topic pretty seriously. I knew a few people locally who were killed by it in the first couple years of the pandemic. Still, I haven't seen the latest wave of COVID getting much news coverage at all. Nevertheless, I don't consider it being the same as colds and flu. Will the latest wave of COVID affect attendance at commercial movie theaters? That's hard to say.

I've had COVID at least once that I know of for certain. The symptoms didn't seen any worse than a mild cold. But I lost my ability to smell or taste anything. It took months for those senses to fully recover. I've heard of some people who never recover those senses after a COVID infection. Not being able to taste or smell isn't nearly as bad as going blind or deaf. But it ain't great either. I lost about 10 pounds. Another thing COVID did to me was adversely affect my sense of balance. Not long after I got over the initial illness I had to get on the roof of my house to cut back some limbs from nearby trees. Getting up there scared the shit out of me. Previously I could walk all over that roof like it was no big deal. I went from that to not being able to get off my hands and knees. It was like full-on vertigo. It took a couple of years before my inner ear functions got back to normal.

For most people, getting COVID probably won't be any worse than an average cold. But it's still going to kill some people. And that's added to all the other things that kill people. Influenza on its own can be bad enough some years.

The more serious threats to movie-theater attendance figures are the stupidly short theatrical release window and a general public that appears ever more financially broke. We have a housing industry price bubble that is even more perversely big than the one nearly 20 years ago. Shit is about to break.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Apologies. Covid was mentioned and our theatre was fresh off a couple cases and having to scramble to cover the projection slots left vacant. It was just a tangent, but not entirely off topic for a thread about theatres closing. Did not intend to derail the thread.

[Mark Ogden]

Don't apologize. Threads get derailed all the time here. What starts out as the schematic for a Strong rectifier turns into whether or not the overhead cam engine was a good idea, then goes back to the rectifier. Common.

[Lyle Romer]

The more serious threats to movie-theater attendance figures are the stupidly short theatrical release window and a general public that appears ever more financially broke. We have a housing industry price bubble that is even more perversely big than the one nearly 20 years ago. Shit is about to break.

Spot on on both topics. They are both threats on their own but when combined they become a nuclear bomb level threat.

As far as COVID, it's not that I don't take it seriously, it's that there isn't much I/we can really do about it without drastic alterations to the way we live. It mutates too easily and quickly for a vaccine to be highly effective so the best you can get is some risk reduction. The only way to achieve massive risk reduction would be to live in a way that I don't really consider living so I just add it to the list of other things I might catch walking around.

[Bobby Henderson]

I think one of the best methods of risk reduction for COVID is living a more healthy lifestyle. That means real exercise on a regular basis and eating more healthy. COVID did kill some perfectly fit people just on sheer bad luck over their genetics. Far more of those killed by COVID had other serious health issues. They were already compromised in some manner. One of my friends who died of COVID struggled with alcoholism for many years; his liver was damned near shot.

With that being said, I would hope more people will get out of the house and visit a movie theater rather than cocooning themselves at home. Lapsing into a sort of bunker mentality habit isn't good for the mind or body. But now I'm more worried about the economy than I am of COVID. A lot of signs are pointing to a sharp downturn in the housing industry, a possible spike in unemployment and a serious recession in the near future. A bunch of people may go from having a choice to get out of the house to not being able to afford to get out of the house.

[Lyle Romer]

I share Bobby's concerns about the economy. It seems that the inevitable has just been delayed for the last few years and when the recession hits finally it will be REALLY deep. On the housing side of things, it's like nobody learned anything from 2008. We just spent a bunch of money bailing out banks and then everything just slid back to the status quo that was happening leading up to 2008. It's mind boggling as it wasn't THAT long ago. I understand not learning from the housing crisis of 1812 (I made that up) but I don't understand not learning from something 16 years ago.

[Martin McCaffery]

the housing crisis of 1812 (I made that up)

The British haven't burned it since then, so we must have learned something

(yeah, I know it was 1814, work with me)

[Bobby Henderson]

One of the reasons why we now have an even bigger housing price bubble than the one in the mid 2000's is various elected "lawmakers" deliberately rolled back certain regulations they wrote into law after the last housing industry crash. So here we are now, doing it even bigger than last time. Games are being played in attempts to sustain this price speculation gravy train -forced scarcity in housing being one of those games. But the fundamentals of the situation are so obscene in their excess that they are eroding the very bedrock of our society.

Two big things are not escapable. One: our society's future depends on tens of millions of young adults breeding new citizens into existence; most of those young adults are not rich. Two: our society needs lots of "ditch digger" level workers -employees we take utterly for granted. Every city and town, no matter how rich its citizens are, depends on workers making shit pay. We're talking people who stock store shelves, cook food, haul garbage, etc. That's in addition to the cops, teachers, fire fighters and skilled laborers (plumbers, electricians, etc). So many cities around this nation have become NOT affordable at all to most of these kinds of workers. There are many millions of young adults being totally priced out of parenthood. All of this stuff can lead to a long term structural decline in this country's housing industry. I can foresee a scenario where a bunch of these McMansion neighborhoods are sitting empty, waiting for the wrecking ball. They might be bulldozing a bunch of those big-ass homes. Because why would a single, unmarried, child-less adult need a big-ass house with big-ass utility bills, big-ass property taxes and big-ass maintenance costs? America's housing industry is going to be very different when we are in the throes of demographic collapse.

Despite attempts at forced scarcity, the inventory levels of vacant housing is shooting way up in a growing number of markets. Price over-valuation is over 30% in many metro areas. Commercial real estate in big city centers is probably in just as dire a situation, if not worse. I heard Manhattan's office vacancy rate is over 20%.

[Leo Enticknap]

Two: our society needs lots of "ditch digger" level workers -employees we take utterly for granted. Every city and town, no matter how rich its citizens are, depends on workers making shit pay. We're talking people who stock store shelves, cook food, haul garbage, etc.

I suspect that a significant number of those jobs will be automated out of existence within the next generation or two, just as the combine harvester automated a lot of farming jobs out of existence, the Diesel engine removed between tens and hundreds of jobs from the crews of ocean liners and freighters, etc. etc. The California fast food minimum wage hike to $20/hour sparked some media attention around burger flipping robots, etc.: it looks like they're currently not as cheap or reliable as humans, even at $20 an hour, but they're getting there.