Pacific has announced that Pacific and Arclight Cinemas will close permanently. Variety reports:
Arclight Cinemas and Pacific Theatres will close down, a victim of a global pandemic that brought moviegoing to a standstill. The news comes as things were beginning to look up for the hard-hit exhibition industry and serves as a reminder of the economic devastation wrought by a public health crisis that upended cultural life.
“After shutting our doors more than a year ago, today we must share the difficult and sad news that Pacific will not be reopening its ArcLight Cinemas and Pacific Theatres locations,†the company said in a statement. “This was not the outcome anyone wanted, but despite a huge effort that exhausted all potential options, the company does not have a viable way forward.â€
The chain has more than 300 theaters, mostly in California but also in Chicago, Boston, and Maryland.
The critical success factors for cinemas are location and rent (most locations are not owned but rented). Lockdowns followed by capacity restrictions have cut into the business of the cinema operating companies.
I suspect we’ll see a sort of cascade effect. Some of the cinemas vacated by Pacific will be taken over by other operators but I suspect most spaces will be used for other purposes. There isn’t a throng of retailers eager to take over the spaces they vacate. It may be some time before those spaces are repurposed. Around here the nearest shopping malls already have a lot of empty space. We’ll probably also see mall failures and a commensurate reduction in property tax revenues and possibly even sales tax revenues on which state and local governments depend.
We don’t know what the “new normal” is going to look like yet but there are likely to be some major differences from the pre-2020 normal. Just as another indicator big city public school kindergarten enrollments for September 2021 are substantially lower.
