Blow to moviegoers in the cradle of the industry.
The pandemic has claimed one more victim in a sector that adds considerable losses.
The popular Pacific and Arclight cinema chain announced on Monday afternoon that they will not reopen their doors after the end of the health emergency.
There will be no happy ending in Hollywood for a beloved local company that turned off its projectors more than a year ago.
The bad news comes just as California prepares the full reopening, which is dated for June 15 if the state maintains the speed of vaccination and a low number of hospitalized for coronavirus.
Hope was not enough for the chain, which operates 300 theaters in the state.
"Despite a huge effort that exhausted all potential options, the company does not have a viable path ahead," says the statement from the Decurion company, which owns both chains.
The Cinerama dome has become one of Sunset Boulevard's landmarks.
Its geodesic dome has been part of the Los Angeles Avenue landscape since it opened in 1963. The iconic building, operated by Pacific as part of the Arclight Hollywood complex since 2002, was part of Quentin Tarantino's tribute to an era in
Once Upon once in hollywood.
The cinema not only appears in the film, but it was one of the only five that exhibited its version in celluloid of 70 millimeters in the United States, a country that had more than 41,700 screens spread over more than 5,400 complexes in 2019. In 2020 it was They lost 174 screens, but there is still a long time to quantify the impact of the blow that the pandemic has caused.
That exhibition of the latest Tarantino film serves to explain what has been lost this Monday.
In one of its midnight functions on the opening days, in July 2019, an error in the projector caused the second half to be projected digitally on the screen, one of the largest in the world with its 9.7 meters high. and 26 meters long.
The show ended after 4.30 am with an awkward but happy audience.
Once again, the communion ceremony culminated in a temple for devotees.
The ArcLight Network Theater in Culver City, Los Angeles.Franck Bohbot / INSTITUTE
And that has been one of the most regretted aspects after the announcement of Decurion.
"This sucks.
Every single person who worked at Arclight loved the movies and you could feel it, "wrote Rian Johnson, director of
The Last Jedi
and
Knives Out
, on Twitter
.
David Ayers, screenwriter for
Training Day
and
End of Watch,
also shared what those rooms meant to industry professionals:
“It
was my place when I wanted to study a movie.
And the dome was a sacred meeting place.
Cinemas are too powerful an experience to let it fade. "
Gourmet rooms
Pacific Cinemas were founded in 1946 by William Forman.
The great leap made by the chain is mainly due to Christopher Forman, who took the lead in the business of his father and grandfather.
It was he who in 1997 began pointing to a trend that soon began to adapt in the following decades around the world.
Cinemas with premium service.
The highest technology of projection, sale of alcohol and gourmet food.
Tickets, 20% more expensive than elsewhere.
With that promise of luxury, 14 Arclight theaters opened in Hollywood.
It was 2002 and there was no one competing for that exclusive market.
The experiment worked.
The company went from making $ 50 million in 2009 to $ 70 million three years later.
Some local journalists believe that Decurion has made the announcement to negotiate past-due rents with landlords in complexes located in high-value territories to buy time to obtain liquidity.
Then came the pandemic, a global evil that accelerated the transformation of the exhibition industry after the irruption of
streaming
.
The crisis caused by the large quarantine caused that 70% of the operators of small and medium cinemas warned that they would go bankrupt without the help of the federal government.
The giants also maneuvered to avoid bankruptcy.
This is what AMC did, which resumed its operations from July 15, 2020, and which broke the untouchable golden rule of the exhibition by reducing the window of exclusivity of titles to show before its rise from three months to only 17 days to digital platforms.
The aid eventually came in the form of a subsidy for closed shop operators. The $ 16 billion program promoted by the Donald Trump Administration before leaving the White House can transfer up to $ 10 million to museums, theater producers, concert promoters and theater operators who lost up to 90% of their revenue. during 2020. The funds have started to be transferred in April. It may be too late, but viewers of hundreds of films on Pacific and Arclight are still waiting for a hero to save history.