Mannheim (dpa / lsw) – The corona crisis requires fans of cinemas and their operators a lot of patience. Some are anxious to ask how long the movie theaters will last through the break. According to Sascha Keilholz, the new head of the Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival, the corona crisis could, in the worst case, mean the end of several program cinemas. “It hits everyone equally hard, but it hits program cinemas the hardest, while municipal cinemas are usually supported by the municipalities and many group-managed multiplexes still have reserves,” he told the German Press Agency.
Corona could trigger a cinema death – after years of a slightly increasing number of movie theaters, especially in urban areas. There are currently 1,734 cinemas in Germany.
Streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon primarily benefited from the currently changing usage behavior. Keilholz: “If new films go online first, the cinemas lose their exclusivity and they have less and less time to evaluate a film and therefore less revenue.” The complaints of the cinemas do not go unheeded: for example, every commercial cinema in the southwest that received a prize from the Media and Film Society of the State of Baden-Württemberg (MFG) last year receives a surcharge of 5,000 euros. These are around 60 art house cinemas from 255 cinemas between the Main and Lake Constance.
The municipal cinemas see themselves in distress, but unlike program cinemas, they are not only dependent on ticket revenues. They are co-financed by the public sector. Nevertheless, the regional association of municipal cinemas calls for a special emergency pot in the country.
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