Robbie COLLIN
Delays to the release of big movies are putting the future of Britain’s cinemas in peril. Robbie Collin reports
The foyer of the Picture House in Uckfield lies silent when, in a fairer world, it would be shaking with the sound of an exploding jumbo jet. This was meant to be the weekend that Tenet, the new Christopher Nolan film, opened in cinemas – and, according to its trailer, a scene in which a Boeing 747 ploughs headlong into an aircraft hangar was just one of the low-key divertissements in store.
Even as lockdown wore on, and other coming attractions scuttled for cover – James Bond to November, with rumours of a further delay now swirling; the latest Fast &
Furious to April 2021 – Warner Bros stood firm by Tenet’s long-planned July 17 release, to the relief of cinema-owners and programmers everywhere. After four months of nothing, Nolan’s film was widely regarded as the one that would allow cinemas like Uckfield’s Picture House to reopen in style. When the time came to coax back uncertain customers, you couldn’t ask for more than a brand-new, hotly anticipated blockbuster from the director of Inception and Dunkirk.
Except, two weeks after cinemas began reopening in England (with Scotland and Northern Ireland following suit this week and Wales a week on Monday),
Tenet is nowhere to be seen. Nor is Disney’s live-action remake of their 1998 animation Mulan, which was long positioned as the other cornerstone of the movies’ big comeback. After months of rousing talk, both studios blinked, and the films were pushed back to August 12 and 19 respectively. At the time of writing, that’s where both remain, though industry analysts are now anticipating further slippage.
For prospective cinemagoers, the uncertainty is frustrating. For the cinemas themselves, it’s an existential threat.
“My decision to reopen has been based entirely on Tenet,” Kevin Markwick, the owner of the Picture House, tells me. “While I want to open as soon as possible, if there’s no new product to play, I don’t feel that we can. The danger is, we could go out of business quicker by reopening, because costs will go up, but the income won’t be there. So for the time being, it’s safer to remain indefinitely closed.”
Markwick is far from alone.
In May, Cineworld announced that its multiplexes and boutique Picturehouse sites – no relation to Uckfield’s – would be opening their doors in early July, in readiness for
Mulan and Tenet. But when the films retreated, so did those plans, to the end of the month. Vue did likewise: their planned July 10 return was later toned down into a “phased reopening”, also beginning on July 31.
Odeon and Everyman were initially bullish, unlocking a handful of locations two weeks ago, with more promised soon, but both companies have since moved to more cautious timetables. Many smaller cinemas have decided to sit out the summer entirely, since the cost of Covidproofing their venues is unlikely to be offset by ticket sales, even with the catalogue of 450 classics which has been made available to the sector while it gets back on its feet. “It might be nice to show The Empire
Strikes Back on the big screen again,” Markwick says, “but you can only get by for so long on films everyone’s already seen.”
The official Warner Bros line is that Tenet will be released “when exhibitors are ready and public health officials say it’s time”. Yet all over Europe, Australia and Asia (including parts of China from this coming Monday), cinemas have been given the green light, and are gunning their engines. The problem is the US, where Covid-19 is still running rampant, and infections continued to rise in 41 states this week. New York’s cinemas still don’t feature on the state’s multiphase reopening plan, while California’s were ordered to close indefinitely on Monday, as new cases and hospitalisations hit record levels. What Hollywood hasn’t quite yet managed to say out loud is that they want the rest of the world to hang on until America sorts itself out. By the look of things, though, it may be some time.
In the days when film distribution meant lugging 35mm prints around the planet, it was common for studios to stagger the international roll-out of their biggest titles by weeks, if not months. (In 1985, Back to the
Future was a summer blockbuster in the US and a Christmas one in the UK.) But with digital technology came the possibility of simultaneous global debuts, and Hollywood’s 21stcentury pivot to incredibly expensive, franchise-driven filmmaking has come to depend on that business model. Once marketing costs are factored in, films on the scale of Tenet and Mulan represent $400 million (£320 million) investments: if they aren’t explosively successful everywhere immediately, disaster awaits.
Bypassing cinemas and landing straight to streaming platforms can work for less costly projects, as Universal found in April with
Trolls World Tour, which recouped its $100 million budget in online rental fees over three weeks. But quadrupling that result just to break even – particularly with films that are significantly more susceptible to piracy than a cartoon about fluffy singing pixies – is not a challenge any studio wants to take on.
But who needs blockbusters? You might imagine this would be a perfect time for smaller films to seize the spotlight. In fact, it’s the opposite. Back in May, the independent distributor Vertigo Releasing bought the UK rights for the critically acclaimed comedy Saint Frances, and soon had it scheduled for a theatrical release one week before Tenet. “We had more than 200 cinemas lined up to show it,” says Rupert Preston, Vertigo’s CEO. “But then that number dropped to 20 overnight, so we had to hold back.” After two further postponements, Saint Frances is now due to open next weekend, “when we should be able to secure more than 100 screens for it”, Preston continues. “Some cinemas are referring to this as the warm-up stage. Unfortunately, at the moment it’s fairly tepid.”
This vicious circle of delays has even set back art house venues,
Cinemas here have been given the green light – the problem is the US, where Covid is running rampant
which have been starved of their own staple diet of world cinema releases by the (hopefully shortterm) suspension of the festival circuit. “The release schedule is moving around so much that drawing up a programme is basically impossible,” explains Wendy Cook of the Hyde Park Picture House, in Leeds – again, no relation. “So we’re relying on those bigger titles to restore stability and confidence.”
They may not have long. Cinemas’ running costs are significant whether they’re open or not, and even with support from the Government’s furlough scheme, the past four months have been devastating. Three crowd-pulling Oscar contenders, 1917,
Little Women and Jojo Rabbit, had given the Picture House in Uckfield the “strongest start to a year we’d ever had”, Markwick says: no small claim, since his family bought the place in 1964. “So we’ve got enough in the tank for the time being. But if we’re still closed in October, things get really dangerous.”
In other words, it’s crunch time. Will Hollywood pluck up the nerve to press on without America, or keep spinning out the delay and thereby hasten the demise of countless cinemas worldwide? If those August dates hold, Tenet and
Mulan will almost certainly bomb by pre-Covid standards, unless they end up playing for months on end. But perhaps studios just have to accept those losses as a kind of down payment on the industry’s continued existence. If cinemas start expiring en masse in 2020, good luck breaking even in 2021.