COVID-19 causes Regal Cinema closures. Lexington theater will be affected.
Lexington moviegoers’ will lose another option. Regal is temporarily closing the theater in Hamburg Pavilion and other sites across the United States.
The company decided to shut down all U.S. theaters after close of business Thursday, according to an email from the company’s executives shared on Twitter Monday morning. The move will affect 536 U.S. theaters, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“This decision was made only after doing everything in our power to support a safe and successful reopening,” the Regal executive management team said in an email.
Regal Cinemas’ parent company, Cineworld, is also shuttering all of its theaters in the United Kingdom, the company’s union confirmed Monday morning. Cineworld is the second-largest film exhibitor in the world behind AMC, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
One major factor in the closing was the ongoing delays in the release of “No Time to Die,” the latest James Bond movie. The movie was originally scheduled to open in November 2019. The film has been delayed three times and is now scheduled to release in April 2021.
Without a stream of box-office hits, the movie industry has struggled since theaters reopened earlier this year.
Regal executives also blamed New York’s COVID-19 precautions. Keeping theaters closed in such a large market caused an “increasingly empty” release calendar for the fall, executives said in an email.
As of March, the pandemic had already cost the film industry as much as $5 billion, according to Quartz.
The closures aren’t expected to be permanent, according to Regal’s executive team.
“We will reopen when key markets have more concrete guidance on their reopening status, and as a result, studios bring their pipeline of major releases back to the big screen,” the executive team said in an email.
COVID-19 has also caused the Kentucky Theatre in downtown Lexington to close. Its reopen date is still unclear. Last month, the AMC movie theater — a first-run theater at Mapleleaf Drive and Man o’ War Boulevard — closed.
This story was originally published October 5, 2020 at 7:33 AM.