The Stranger Things.
People are being advised to stay at home and practice social distancing to protect those most at risk as well as to ensure that the spread of the virus can drastically slow down. We’re currently in a period of immense precarity and ambiguity, meaning that anything can happen and we have no idea how long any of this is going to go on for. The United States has been somewhat slower to take serious measures compared to other countries, but it's now impossible to ignore the impact that the coronavirus is having on every aspect of life. The entertainment industry saw that in action this weekend when the domestic box office reported shockingly low numbers that haven’t been replicated in many years.
According to Bloodshot, starring Vin Diesel, scraped by with $9.3 million, landing it at number three on the list. The weekend itself was the lowest since September 2000.
The last time America saw such a drastic and unexpected drop in box office revenue from week-to-week was in 2001, following the terrorist attacks on September 11. As noted by Zoolander.
At the time, postponed films such as the Disney movie Big Trouble flopped in new slots, while war films and action thrillers proved tough to market. Many films, including Zoolander, scrambled to digitally remove the World Trade Center towers from landscape shots. Comparing the current box office fallout to that in the aftermath of September 11 isn’t entirely fair for obvious reasons: You can’t draw direct parallels between a terrorist attack and a pandemic for any reason, much less something like the economics of a movie. What is worth noting, however, is how rare these instances are and how there is essentially no planning or safety net in place for them. The film world has no long-term measures to navigate what could be a weeks-long drought of revenue because it’s never had to figure out such issues. For now, studios are moving back their biggest releases, like Mulan. Whatever happens, it will take a long time for Hollywood to return to business as usual and for the marketplace to follow suit.
