Regal Cinemas’ parent company Cineworld will re-open its locations across the U.S., U.K. and Europe over the next month starting with a June 26th re-open in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Cineworld operates 787 locations and 9,500 screens in ten countries. Like AMC, it boasts a massive debt load of $3.5 billion and recently secured hundreds of millions of dollars in additional cash through debt offerings.
AMC, the world’s largest chain, and Cinemark, the 3rd largest chain in the U.S., have also planned reopening for the next several weeks. All will open with enhanced sanitization, social distancing and other procedures geared to keep health risks to a minimum.
Even so, we’re still a long way from cinemas returning to normal operations around much of the world and some months from the release schedule truly stabilising. Cinemas will be operating at limited capacities and some major countries like China and the U.S. are expected lose as much as 40% and 25% respectively of their cinema capacity pre-pandemic.
One part of the solution according to IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond is to entice patrons away from the surges that come on Friday and Saturday nights, telling a CSFB media conference this week: “The key is, can you spread that out? And I think that will naturally happen before there is a vaccine… we will market to stagger those hours.”
