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This observation is even more visible within the nine US states that already reached a significant majority, 80% by market share, of movie theaters in operation. In contrast the locations currently open in February are 42% of the tracked US movie theaters representing 43% of the market share, thus slightly over-indexing in box office performance. While the 1,210 movie theaters that last reported in March 2020 are 23% of all tracked US movie theaters, they represent just 18% of the market share. The movie theaters that haven’t re-opened in the last 11 months were, in general, lower grossing locations. Of the 5,253 movie theaters they tracked across the US in 2020, we took the last reported day of each individual cinema as most recent day of operation. To understand the structure of closure and re-opening Gower Street Analytics utilized data from our partners at Comscore. However, many have never re-opened their doors to audiences since they turned out the lights in their auditoriums in March 2020. A slow re-opening, up to 43% as of the middle of February, has taken place.Īlthough less than half of all US movie theaters are currently open, most have at least taken the chance to re-open once or more after being forced to close last year. Since the beginning of 2021 the situation has improved slightly. By the end of the year the number of movie theaters open by market share had fallen to 38%. It stayed there for just two weeks before the triangle-of-troubles: Lack of Product / Re-closing of movie theaters / New or further rise in COVID-19 cases put the brakes on recovery. This positive trend peaked at the end of the month with 61%. The re-opening accelerated from that point in the build up to the release of TENET on September 3, when 56% of movie theaters by market share were open. This number started to improve slowly from the end of May up to 19% of movie theaters open by market share in mid-august. A week later it was under 4%, before hitting rock bottom in April with 1%. Within two days less than 40% of domestic theatres were operating.
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March 15 saw closure orders in New York City and Los Angeles.
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Over the March 13-15 weekend in 2020 most theatres were still open, but the threat of COVID-19 was already causing the lowest three-day weekend result since September 2000. Nearly a quarter (23%) of all US movie theaters have stayed closed since March 2020! These locations generated a combined yearly box office of $1.8 billion on average in 20. Almost a year has passed from when the number of movie theaters operating in North America started to sink significantly due to the COVID-19 crisis.