It’s not the final curtain for cinemas

London Evening Standard

Warner Bros’s decision to stream its entire slate of 2021 movies on its HBO Max service, at the same time as their release in movie theatres, has dealt another blow to cinema groups, says Jim Armitage. The mood music in the sector is grim – “think funeral bells and Hammer Horror organs”. The impact of streaming, hastened by the pandemic, has resulted in cinema’s biggest existential threat since the arrival of VHS or cable TV. Shares in cinema groups have collapsed. But don’t write them off too soon. “Just because the studios can go direct to people’s living rooms doesn’t mean we want them to.” People flocked to cinemas before Covid, and the chances are they’ll return when it passes. Besides, the studios have a big financial interest in these institutions: they make “far more money from a family of five paying £50 to go to the cinema than they do from a tenner on pay-per-view”. Those economics will eventually force a compromise. At today’s prices, “risk-taking” investors might consider buying bombed-out cinema stocks. “Cue up the danger music...”

Nine years ago, “in between scooting round Birmingham as a delivery boy for Pizza Hut and studying at university”, Ben Francis began hand-stitching gymwear from his parents’ garage, said Ben Machell in The Times. He printed “Gymshark” on them and sold them online. In August, Gymshark became “only the second British company to reach a £1bn valuation without prior support from outside investors”, having stormed to sales of £250m last year. Francis, now 28, works out five days a week and reckons he has “the best job in the world”. Even so, this isn’t “a situation I expected to find myself in”, he says. “I got my mum and nan to teach me to sew... then a local lad showed me how to do screen-printing. And that was it really.”