How Covid -19 always has an impact on films – and theaters: NPR

As good as Hollywood is to imagine alternative realities, he did not see this one coming.

The first weekend in March 2020, as Pixar Ahead seal Sonic the Hedgehog, the invisible man, And Bad boys for life At Cineplexes, North American cinemas experienced a catchy weekend of $ 100 million. Two weeks later, a very decreased Tinseltown said that its ticket sales on weekends, according to the industry tracking site, Box Office Mojo, amounted to $ 4,160.

It is not a typo.

What came between the two is Cavid -19, a disease widespread by proximity – the very thing that makes the film a popular experience. In the space of a few days, most of the American cinemas had closed, and those who remained open – mainly drive -ins – were so little frequented that they barely made the pay.

It would take months before the big theater channels were resumed, and when they did, cinema was no longer the carefree activity of leisure. In some places, attending a film at the end of 2020 involved masks, temperature scanners at the door, a contactless ticket office.

I know all this because I wrote about it. I had to do it, Hollywood not released new films in theaters. The alleged blockbusters of this year – the thriller 007 No time to dieMarvel’s Black Widow, Steven Spielberg West Side Story – All pushed their openings until 2021.

So, for a while, I wrote on the films that lovers of films could catch at home: Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers Musicals, Harold and Maude, do the right thingSilent Classics with Buster Keaton.

Then, I wrote on industry strategies – how the studios published films on video on demand or streaming services, while filmmakers arose in how to make films without endangering casts or crews.

Filmmaker Mark Duplass joined the actress and director Natalie Morales to make two Tongue lessons About an unexpected friendship between a woman who teaches Spanish online and a man whose husband bought 100 lessons for him as a surprise. The premise allowed them to film without ever being in the same room.

The film How does it end Has taken a different accent, spinning its story with an imminent asteroid collision largely outside, in a scary Los Angeles – if it is understandable -.

When summer arrived and that theaters had to reopen or go bankrupt, new problems arose. In August, I attended a screening of criticisms for the thriller to fold in the time of Christopher Nolan Principle, Joining six other criticisms spaced as far as possible in an IMAX house with 450 places. I remember thinking it couldn’t be seriously the model for the future.

And indeed, when theaters showed the film, some with seats in checkered models that have limited frequentation to a tenth of capacity, Principle took $ 20 million during the long weekend of the Labor Day-easily the highest box office number in five months, but far from what was necessary to break even for a film that had cost hundreds of millions to do and market.

And profitability was hardly the only consideration. The public trauma is almost forgotten that these first films in the Pandemic Age had to negotiate and address. Little fishPublished in early 2021, was completed before COVID -19, but its conspiracy – on a global memory loss plague – resonated because it has obtained details of a pandemic right: masks in public, the tips in hospitals, visits to the family becoming difficult, the workplaces feeling risky.

Glass onion: a mystery of knives, Released not in theaters, but on Netflix, seemed inspired by the collection of celebrities out of contact during the pandemic. His characters arrived masked, engaged in pandemic games and hobbies, and took a theoretical oral vaccine then.

And at the end of 2020, the British tabloid The sun published a recording of Tom Cruise going ballistic on the set of Mission Impossible: Dead Cylionning. It seemed that two crew members had violated the strict protocols of distancing production of production by standing too closely from each other to a computer terminal and by making them known in a diatribe profanity that their apologies would not be enough if an epidemic forced them to suspend the shooting.

“Tell it to people who lose their FTS F ******* because our industry is closed,” he shouted. “This is what I sleep with every night: the future of this industry F ******.”

He was not wrong. Five years after the greatest drop in attendance in cinematographic history, Hollywood is still struggling to retreat from depths. The nine weeks of posting this year’s tickets in North America ($ 1.09 billion) are an improvement compared to last year, but they still go well behind the pre-cook weeks of 2020 ($ 1.67 billion).

Ahead, As this Pixar title gave it in March 2020, and hopefully, upwards.