Movie fans returning to Los Angeles theaters find excitement at just showing up

The theater, a historic treasure that opened in 1926, is on one of the busiest streets in Los Angeles, Hollywood Boulevard. In it and in other cinemas in the city, masks are necessary, the spaces have been disinfected, the dealers sell everything pre-packaged behind the plexiglass and the capacity is limited to 25% or 100 people, whichever is less.

For months, executives at major Hollywood studios and theater chains said that when markets in major cities like Los Angeles and New York reopened, combined with the successful launch of the Covid-19 vaccine, it would help revive the theater market. .

Now, after theaters in New York opened two weeks ago and Los Angeles theaters this weekend, the industry will see how movie buffs may be desperate to return. Before the pandemic, Los Angeles accounted for about 8% of the domestic audience – America’s largest metropolitan theater market – according to media measurement company Comscore.

The first weekend of reopening in LA brought in the diehards.

“It’s a bit of an emotional day,” said Ruiz, with teary eyes after his first visit to the cinema since March 2020. “I’m very happy to be back in the cinema.”

Cinemas have a special place in the history and economy of Los Angeles. Then, when many cinemas opened their doors on Friday for the first time in a year, people showed up, in some cases taking all available seats.

With a restricted audience, El Capitan looked more like a Tuesday morning matinee at 11 am. Still, general manager James Wood posed for pictures with local news crews, ecstatic to see movie fans again in the halls where he worked for two decades.

Mr. Wood had the bad luck to ascend to his current position just before the blockades closed public spaces. “My whole focus was at this point,” said Wood, pleased that two of the day’s four exhibitions had run out of limited capacity. “People want to go back to the cinema.”

With no more than a hundred people on the El Capitan with approximately 1,000 seats, people were not shy about putting their feet on the chairs in front of them or lowering their masks to munch on snacks.

Data collected by the National Research Group, which has followed the moviegoer’s sentiment for 40 years, says that 57% of respondents before the weekend expressed comfort with the prospect of returning to cinemas, compared to a 19% drop in April 2020.

Although theaters in the United States have slowly reopened in recent months, audiences have dwindled as Hollywood studios shelve film shows like Paramount Pictures’ “Top Gun: Maverick”, starring Tom Cruise, and the latest film by James Bond “No Time to Die,” from MGM Holdings Inc.

“Seeing all the films being pushed back and forth has always broken my heart,” said Allison Sharpley, who on Friday ventured out alone at her favorite local theater, AMC’s Century City 15, to see the Universal Pictures Oscar – named “Promising young woman”, a darkly comical tale of revenge.

Like “Raya and the Last Dragon”, “Promising Young Woman” can also be broadcast at home.

The 45-year-old health worker now works at a vaccine clinic, distributing up to 400 vaccines a day. She said she tried drive-ins during the pandemic to support Hollywood, as many of her friends work in the business. But sitting in a car or watching from home doesn’t compare, she said.

“I didn’t want to see ‘Wonder Woman’ for the first time on my little 32-inch TV,” she said. “There is something about that experience and sharing that experience with a lot of other people. That’s why I come. “

But many people watched “Wonder Woman 1984” at home as AT&T Inc.’s

The Warner Bros. film studio. launched the film in theaters and online in an effort to attract consumers to its fledgling streaming service HBO Max.

During the pandemic, Hollywood studios like Warner Bros., Disney and Universal Pictures from Comcast Corp. launched more films online, a move that left many cinema owners on their heels. Before, the coveted window of exclusivity of theaters – a time when films were only available in theaters – was the basis of his business. Domestic box office revenue fell to $ 2.2 billion in 2020, down from $ 11.4 billion in 2019, according to the Motion Picture Association.

With the reopening of Los Angeles, the country’s largest theater chain, AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.,

says that 98% of its cinemas are already operational. But the country’s second largest network, the Cineworld Group PLC’s Regal Entertainment Group, has not yet reopened in America. Third largest Cinemark Holdings chain Inc.

it now has about 90% of cinemas open.

The world’s largest streaming service, Netflix Inc.,

does not depend on selling theater tickets to earn revenue, but the company still chose to screen its black-and-white movie “Mank” in some Los Angeles area cinemas before this year’s Oscar on April 25. Some moviegoers on Friday went to the theater to see him on the big screen.

“Mank”, which has garnered more Oscar nominations than any other film in this year’s Oscar camp, goes behind the scenes in the production of what many critics call the greatest film of all time, “Citizen Kane” by director Orson Welles.

Almost 80 years ago, Mr. Welles made the film’s Hollywood debut at El Capitan in May 1941.

“This is my favorite theater,” said Shahbaaz Shah, a 38-year-old animation director at Disney who transported his two teenage children – one of whom wants to enter the cinema – from the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale to El Capitan to see ” Raya and the Last Dragon ”.

When the lights came on, the dispersed crowd filled the auditorium with applause.