By Harley Nefe
All 536 Regal movie theater locations, which house 7,076 screens across 42 states, including the Regal Boone Cinema location, will shut down after the business day on Thursday, Oct. 8.
The movie theater chain tweeted a statement this afternoon announcing the closure, saying:
“In response to an increasingly challenging theatrical landscape and sustained key market closures, Regal will suspend operations at all theatres at close of business on Thursday, October 8, 2020 until further notice.”
The closure is happening less than a week from when Regal Boone Cinema made its reopening on Friday, Oct. 2 at 5 p.m. The reopening occurred six months after all the Regal theater locations had to close on March 17 as a precaution to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mooky Greidinger, who is the CEO of Cineworld, which is the parent company of Regal, said in a statement:
“This is not a decision we made lightly, and we did everything in our power to support a safe and sustainable reopening in the U.S. – from putting in place robust health and safety measures at our theatres to joining our industry in making a collective commitment to the CinemaSafe protocols to reaching out to state and local officials to educate them on these initiatives. We are especially grateful for and proud of the hard work our employees put in to adapt our theatres to the new protocols and cannot underscore enough how difficult this decision was.”
The closures will impact approximately 40,000 employees across the U.S.
Greidinger added, “The prolonged closures have had a detrimental impact on the release slate for the rest of the year, and, in turn, our ability to supply our customers with the lineup of blockbusters they’ve come to expect from us. As such, it is simply impossible to continue operations in our primary markets.”
The decision to suspend all operations until further notice was announced after James Bond franchise’s “No Time to Die” was postponed until 2021, further pushing back the release that had already been delayed.
The statement further said Regal will continue to monitor the situation closely and will communicate any future plans to resume operations at the appropriate time, when key markets have more concrete guidance on their reopening status and, in turn, studios are able to bring their pipeline of major releases back to the big screen.
From now until Thursday, specific movie showtimes for Regal Boone Cinema can be found on its website.
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