Arthouses Fight to Survive Pandemic: ‘Everyone Says It’s Dead But It Never Is’
variety.comRobert Strauss Audiences and exhibitors may have been cheering the Spider-Man movie for months, but 2022’s most emotional theatrical experience so far is watching Greg Laemmle struggle with the fate of his family’s eponymous arthouse business in the documentary “Only in Theaters.”Premiered at the Santa Barbara Intl.
Film Festival in March, “Only” inevitably focuses on the 84-year-old Southern California theater chain’s struggle to survive — first during the 2019 downturn in specialty film attendance and then through a yearlong, COVID pandemic shutdown.
The wear on the company’s third generation president is palpable and poignant.“I’m, at some level, better than I seem in the film,” Laemmle tells Variety a year after his theaters reopened. “There have definitely been some less-than-positive developments during the 12 months since we’ve been open, but there have been some positive things, to be sure.” Laemmle could be speaking for the whole American arthouse sector, which has undergone doomsday cycles since its postwar emergence but, as Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard says, “It’s always been there, it constantly evolves, everyone says it’s dead but it never is.”Recent positive signs include decent box office for indie and international releases that earned Academy Award nominations, such as “Drive My Car,” “The Worst Person in the World” and “Licorice Pizza.” Although streamers have been a knife at theatrical’s throat since well before the pandemic magnified their stay-at-home effect, at least Apple TV Plus put “CODA” on some 600 big screens the weekend after it won the best picture Oscar.
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