The first major cinema closures in the U.S. have kicked off with a number of locations Pennsylvania and New Jersey going dark.
Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County and New Jersey’s Bergen County are shutting down ten AMC locations and a handful of Regal cinemas as local government takes active precautions over the coronavirus pandemic.
These include AMC Garden State 16, one of the country’s top-grossing theaters and is just under 20 miles northwest of midtown Manhattan.
New York City’s independent Metrograph on the Lower East Side has also opted to go dark for the time, as have other New York cinemas like the Alamo Drafthouse, BAM, Film Society at Lincoln Center, Nitehawk Cinema, IFC Center, Metrograph and Film Forum.
New York state has the most reported cases of COVID-19 so far with 69, 25 of which have been in Bergen County. Pennsylvania has 47 reported cases with 20 in Montgomery County.
There have been widespread theater closures in Europe and parts of Asia, but U.S. cinemas have stayed open even as measures like ‘social distancing’ have been instituted.
Source: THR
