Last week, Cineworld decided to close all 536 Regal Cinemas in the U.S., furloughing 40,000 employees, and AMC Theatres announced that it faces bankruptcy. In an op-ed in Fortune, Austin Bunn, associate professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts and Koenig Jacobson Sesquicentennial Fellow, re-frames these COVID-related blows as an opportunity.
"I’m a screenwriter, whose early experiences swept up in the power of movies (Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Do the Right Thing, and, okay fine: Dreamscape) have made me park myself in a chair for untold hours trying to reproduce it,” he writes in the piece. “The American way of moviegoing is long overdue for a “page one” rewrite, and I hope that these closures might serve as the inciting incident of a profound transformation in how we experience movies.”
