Regal Cinemas owner Cineworld just made a major announcement and it is killing Hollywood. The chain said that they will be closing all of their locations in the US as well as their theaters in the United Kingdom after MGM and Universal decided to delay the newest James Bond film.
Yahoo Entertainment reported:
The new closures, set to take effect as soon as next week, come just a few months after the company began reopening its locations amid the coronavirus pandemic earlier this summer. Cineworld operates 128 venues in the U.K. and Ireland in addition to Regal’s 546 theaters in the U.S. consisting of 7,211 screens.
Regal is the second largest theatrical chain in the U.S., after AMC, while Cineworld is the U.K.’s biggest cinema operator. Cineworld reported a loss of a $1. 6 billion in the first half of 2020 in recent days, with “no certainty” as to what impact the pandemic could have in the future.
According to the Sunday Times, which first reported news of the Cineworld U.K. closures, the move puts up to 5,500 jobs at risk in that country alone.
Due to the ridiculous coronavirus restrictions in California Disney is being forced to lay off 28,000 employees that worked at their Disneyland resort.
Josh D’Amaro, head of parks at Disney said the decision was difficult but that the company couldn’t continue to pay benefits for employees while the park remains closed.
Disney’s theme parks in Florida, Paris, Shanghai, Japan, and Hong Kong have all opened with limited capacity. California is the place not permitting Disney to reopen.
“As you can imagine, a decision of this magnitude is not easy,” D’Amaro wrote in the memo to employees obtained by CNBC. “For the last several months, our management team has worked tirelessly to avoid having to separate anyone from the company. We’ve cut expenses, suspended capital projects, furloughed our cast members while still paying benefits, and modified our operations to run as efficiently as possible, however, we simply cannot responsibly stay fully staffed while operating at such limited capacity.”
