Cinemas are safer than shops – the science does not support keeping them shut till May
Venues invested vast sums of money in becoming Covid-secure. Once they reopen on May 17, will there be enough films to lure us back?
Tim Robey
22 February 2021 • 4:21pm
Ammonite, hopefully coming to a screen near you soon
After schools go back. After these picnics. After non-essential retail, after "rule-of-six" al fresco dining, after gyms. After all the above, the nation will finally be able to tiptoe back to cinemas again, when they re-open, all being well, on May 17. Because cinemas, of course, are well-known as absolute hotbeds of Covid transmission, and therefore are a final dangerous frontier to be crossed before we return to some kind of brave new world.
This is what the policy seems to imply, and it's thoroughly misleading. There's far more data linking infections to shops and other hospitality venues, in fact, than to situations where you're seated in the dark for a film, even for a full two hours within spitting distance of fellow viewers.
Look at South Korea, which kept its cinemas open for all the many months of the pandemic, while also capitalising on one of the world's most effective track-and-trace systems. In a six-month period last year, the country saw 31.5 million cinema visits, and during that time, 49 of them were by people later confirmed to be Covid-positive. Not one of those 49 visits, according to the track-and-trace, resulted in the virus spreading to anyone else.
This may seem to go against all reason. I hear the counter-argument – cinemas can be rammed, raucous, full of popcorn flying and open-mouthed guffaws. But not in Covid times, and probably not during a fourth-week-of-release screening of Ammonite, which will have been out on VoD that long by the time it's allowed to be shown on big screens.
Venues invested enormously last year in rendering their environments Covid-secure. Human contact has been minimised through phone ticketing, and distancing is arranged by blocking off seats in (usually) chequerboard patterns. Mask-wearing is obligatory, and having everyone face in the same direction is known to reduce transmission risks significantly. According to a survey undertaken by a German cinema trade body, the number of inhaled aerosols is well below that of an office environment in which people speak face-to-face.
Even the huge precautions taken last year weren't enough to allow cinemas to stay open Credit: Reuters
Let's be clear: the risk in a cinema is not zero, and it will be down to each consumer to weigh up whether they're comfortable sitting for so long in relative proximity to other strangers. Personally, I'd much rather take my chances in a carefully conditioned artplex than at the gym, with sweat particles unavoidably dampening the air, wiped brows and sticky handles.
The main thing holding me back won't be lingering Covid dread, but just a shortage of viewing options. Anticipating these dark months with near-depressing accuracy, distributors have moved almost all their major titles back to later in the summer – or all the way back to October, in the case of James Bond. Disney apparently still have Black Widow "opening" on May 7 – which will mean May 17, unless I'm missing something. (There were sketchy rumours of it heading direct to Disney+.)
Oscar favourite Nomadland, which may win before arriving in UK cinemas
A fortnight later, prospects will warm up, with Cruella, Fast & Furious 9 and Kelly Reichardt's wonderful First Cow – one of the best and least-seen films to get a premiere in 2020 – scheduled to arrive in the same week.
I'll undoubtedly be missing the concept of cinemagoing in April, but only in a rather abstract way, because in practice, we'd be sitting there with almost nothing new to see. It's a bit of a shame for Chloé Zhao's Nomadland, which I'm confident will win the Best Picture Oscar on April 25, that its theatrical release will arrive weeks later as a kind of victory lap. But like Parasite a year ago, it deserves long legs and repeat viewings, and would be a pretty great way to christen the big-screen experience for those who've sat it out a year or more.
The wait until then is not going to be fun, and the logic of treating cinemas like plague houses isn't exactly air-tight. Ours not to reason why, merely to count the days.
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