Coronavirus, Hollywood predicts losses for billions

The impact of the coronavirus is felt on the dream industry: Hollywood predicts billions of dollars in lost revenue, while the Chinese market has been stopped for weeks and the majors postpone the release of safe cassette films like the next James Bond .
"Impossible to make predictions," said a source from the Hollywood Reporter, noting also the drop in takings in other important markets such as South Korea and Italy.
Last year the international box office had been 31.1 billion dollars, a record, for a global total of 42.5 billion, another record. But the celebrations soon stopped with the emergence of the virus in China in the early days of 2020 ..
Even in the United States, the most important box office in the world with over 11 billion dollars in sales in 2019, the box office gave signs of failure: the 40 million dollars of tickets sold by the first classified of this weekend, the animated fantasy of Disney / Pixar "Onward", they are just under a quarter compared to the same weekend in 2019 (the comparison with the 153 million "Captain Marvel" was already brutal at the start). The clear signal is that consumers, concerned about the infection, have had little incentive to leave the houses where they can still watch a streaming movie on Netflix or on other digital entertainment platforms. The majors have taken note of these signals: the debut in theaters of the next James Bond "No Time to Die" has been postponed from April to November precisely calling for the impact of the coronavirus, a decision that has led to the hypothesis of other similar choices by part of other studies that have not yet been carried out.
Meanwhile, in China, where the over 70,000 theaters have been closed for weeks, the forecasts are for losses of two billion dollars in the first two months of the year. Disney, which mattered a lot, postponed the Chinese release of "Mulan", while Oscar-winning films such as "1917", "Jojo Rabbit" and "Little Women" have left programming. First stops also for productions: Paramount has postponed "for an abundance of caution", but also in compliance with the Italian rules prohibiting gatherings, the filming of "Mission: Impossible 7" with Tom Cruise which was to be filmed for three weeks in Venice.