Los Angeles cinemas may reopen in a week – deadline

It looks like theaters will have the opportunity to finally reopen here in Los Angeles County next week.

Today, for the first time, LA County’s Covid-19 numbers have fallen to the red tier of Governor Gavin Newsom’s Project for a Safer Economy. Tom Tapp of Deadline reports that if Los Angeles can keep its Covid-19 numbers at that level for just another week, several sectors could reopen – including cinemas with a capacity of 25% or 100 people, whichever is less.

Two more of California’s five largest counties by population – Orange and San Bernardino – also had red numbers this week and, like LA, could have qualified cinemas reopen if they did it again next week. These regions and LA account for 15 million of the state’s 40 million residents.

However, LA – and many other regions of California, by the way – may open even earlier than next Tuesday.

The California Department of Public Health recently revealed that once the state has administered 2 million doses of vaccine in underprivileged neighborhoods, it will make it much easier to move from purple to red. Instead of less than seven daily cases per 100,000 residents, counties only need to move to less than 10 cases per 100,000.

In addition, the move will be retroactive, adding a week of credit to any county that was left out due to a case rate between seven and 10 per 100,000 residents.

The tier list will be updated the day after California crosses 2 million shots fired within the lower economic quartile. As of Tuesday, that group was just under 1.9 million. This could spell a big announcement during Governor Gavin Newsom’s speech on the state of the state on Tuesday night.

In addition to Los Angeles, the eight additional counties ranging from seven to 10 daily cases per 100,000 in the last two updates to the list, while meeting the test’s positivity requirements are Colusa, Contra Costa, Mendocino, Orange, San Benito, San Bernardino, Siskiyou and Sonoma. Amador was below 10 per 100,000 last week, but jumped again this week.

The news comes in the wake of the reopening of New York cinemas, after more than 50 weeks of stoppage during the pandemic, with the market raising $ 1 million in the period March 5-7. Like New York, Los Angeles theaters have been closed since mid-March last year. There was a time last summer when it looked like they could reopen, before Newsom closed the county due to the increase in cases from Covid as the Independence Day holiday approached. Although Los Angeles County never reopened theaters, there was a period when Orange and Ventura Counties did so in time for the Warner Bros. launch in late summer. Principle. During the pandemic, drive-in cinemas were widely opened in LA County.

However, don’t use pompoms for Los Angeles theaters yet. The county itself must decide whether to proceed here after meeting state requirements.

New York cinemas reopen after a year

That said, it won’t be shocking to see the LA exhibition market turning on its lights for the weekend of March 19-21. Exhibitor # 1 AMC has been very aggressive about reopening its cinemas in cities that have shifted to less restrictive levels of Covid confinement, but Regal remains closed, and it is very likely that some other networks like Arclight will also remain closed until there is more special products from the main studios available. For example, there were two major studio releases over the weekend – Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon and Lionsgate Chaos Walking– but there are none this weekend, and it won’t be until March 26, when Universal will have its action movie Bob Odenkirk Nobody. After that, the Easter weekend begins with Warner Bros / HBO Max / Legendary’s Godzilla vs. Kong on March 31 followed by Sony / Screen Gems’ The profane on Good Friday, April 2.

To qualify for the red level, a county must have fewer than seven daily cases per 100,000 residents. On Tuesday, LA County recorded 6.9 daily cases per 100,000. This daily case rate is adjusted for each county based on dozens of factors. As a result, the LA adjusted case rate is even better, at 5.2. It would be necessary to drop below 4 per 100,000 to qualify for the even less restrictive orange level.