Finally!, one might be tempted to write. After three months of judgment, the cinemas French will re-open their doors on Monday, June 22. After the museums and the restaurants, the rooms are ready in their turn to welcome the spectators with new health rules, hoping that the public will be at the rendez-vous at the end of one hundred days of closing. Starting Monday for some, Wednesday for others, the vast majority of the 2000 cinemas of France will offer new sessions, with rooms filled to 50% of their capacity at the maximum, according to the recommendations of the guide to health developed by the Federation nationale des cinemas français (FNCF).
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Seats free on each side of the spectators, or groups (families, couples, etc.), sessions, spaced out to avoid crossing, traffic flows are organized and a distance of at least one metre in queues, wearing a mask, recommended in the halls and corridors, sale of tickets on the internet privileged or regular disinfection of the premises will also be part of the measures put in place, with the desire to reassure the audience.
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So that the FNCF is launching a communication campaign with the slogan All to the cinema, the operators did not hide their impatience to see the public back into the cinemas. “One word: finally!”, launched Emmanuel Delesse, chief operating officer within the group UGC, one of the three main players in the sector in France, with nearly 400 rooms.
“We are very excited,” she said Aurélien Bosc, president of cinémas Pathé Gaumont, the first circuit in France with 903 screens and a quarter of the total attendance. For him, the cost of months of closure “is valued in the tens of millions of euros of losses.”
And to all of the exhibitors, the crisis and the termination of the account according to an estimate of the FNCF nearly 60 million entries that are lost (from early march to late June compared to the previous years), representing a loss of nearly 400 million euros.
An experimental phase
Aurélien Bosc is returned to this first phase of reception of the public: “The reopening within the timing and with this health protocol is still a big challenge for a big circuit like ours. But we are still quite confident. We made quite a lot of customer surveys, which say the envy of people back to the cinema.”
According to a survey released by Médiamétrie published on Wednesday, $ 18.7 million of the French say they have the intention of going to the cinema in the next four weeks, 45% of the spectators of cinema of the last 12 months, with a desire more strong among the regulars (75%) and Parisians (59%).
back in the rooms on which table also Isabelle Gibbal-Hardy, director of the Great Action in the Latin Quarter, and chair of the network of independent Cinemas in paris (CIP), which brings together 28 of the halls of the capital: “It opens gently and we expect to see a return of our spectators in the theatres right from the start. I am reasonably optimistic. This will be a period in a laboratory during which programming will not be identical to that of usual.”
Because if many of the titles will be on display from Monday, many will be movies already out before the containment and return on the screens, among which De Gaulle Gabriel Le Bomin, or the comedy The Good wife of Martin Provost, before the first blockbusters expected at the end of July as Mulan Niki Caro or Tenet of Christopher Nolan).
A year of living dangerously
Released on march 11, with a very good start (171.000 spectators in four days), The Good wife, whose career had been stopped in its tracks on march 14, come out in nearly 800 rooms. “We are trying to do réexister maximum of the film”, explained Alexandre Mallet-Guy, film’s distributor with his company Memento. For him, the situation is “really very fragile” for independent distributors, while “the question arises as to whether the public will return to the rooms quickly.”
Of the concerns shared by the operators. For the president of the FNCF Richard Patry, “this is the year of all dangers. It will take vigilance enormous.” An opinion shared by Thierry Tabaraud, at the head of five theatres in the far East, to Saint-Dizier, Saint-Die-des-Vosges, Vitry-le-François Chaumont and Neufchateau, which has ushered in stating: “Many operators, including myself, are very worried about the re-opening, which will surely put us in a financial situation to be very fragile.” A fear of the future that will not spare Paris because, according to Isabelle Gibbal-Hardy: “Our economic balance will be very difficult to achieve, considering the price of real estate.”
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