Cinema operators have been at the frontline of the coronavirus crisis. Read the first-hand account of the director of a small independent operator in the U.K. about closing up his business, dealing with employees and facing a very uncertain future.
. And at that moment, I don't think we'd ever felt quite so alone in exhibition. Everything was just going. So by Friday 13th, just a week since Bond, we’d lost all the key films coming up, we didn’t have any confirmation what’s going to be actually able to show in the screens, and we still currently had to pay all our business rates, all of our VAT, and all of our rent at some point in the next couple of weeks.
So on Monday, we told all the staff we were staying open, and were going to wait to see what happens later. But we already knew that we couldn't sustain this business with this level of outgoing across the board. Again, there are much bigger things happening in the world, but that moment was a fairly significant one for us. And then, when at that point we're kind of thinking there's not a lot worse that can happen, we hear that Universal is breaking the release window and puttingout early on digital. So it's just the final kick in the teeth that we need at the end of a horrible day.
I think in the end is a personal choice for each business about when they were going to take this decision, but I think the industry standing united as a body and saying that we are deciding to close our doors would have been better. It would have been a better communicated message for the public, with hindsight.
But then – finally – a little bit of good news. On Tuesday evening, they changed the rules on the business [tax] rates, so it was no longer those below £51,000 , it was for everybody in our sector. That, for us, is an amount of money we we’re not going to have to pay every single month from April, so that was a positive thing on a very bad day.
And what we were doing in the background was contacting all the local recruiters we could think of where we operate. There's a lot of food production, and there's a lot of light industrial pre-production packaging – there’s bakeries, chicken and fish factories. There were roles there.
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