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Tag Archives: Pandemic

Warner Bros. Pictures provides cinemas a long runway for reopening

Warner Bros. Pictures is saving cinema. 

In early December of 2020, I first sat down to write this article. That first line was going to be my headline. The same day HBOMax/theater release strategy felt like the best possible decision considering the state of the world. Not every theater in the country was closed. Those that were open had become dependent mostly on limited run and re-release films. Warner Bros. was making the risky decision to keep their film slate moving while offering open cinemas a bone. A very tiny bone, but a bone nonetheless. That was my gut response, but, holy cow, it was not the popular response.

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Frankensteining a pandemic horror film festival

The last time I was in a movie theater was March 13, 2020. COVID-19 had finally arrived on the U.S. shores and we weren’t quite sure what it would mean, but everything was starting to shut down. I figured it would probably be one of my last opportunities to visit the cinema for a couple of months, so I chose the earliest screening of Valiant’s Bloodshot.

It was an uncomfortable experience. The theater was mostly empty but one of the few other attendees chose to sit two seats away from me. He spent the film coughing, snorting, and, at least twice, spitting. I was pretty sure that was going to be it. My zeal to get one last film in would result in hospitalization from this virus we were still trying to understand.

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