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One of my tasks is to report on the financial results of global entertainment giants. Last week, I reported on the 2021 results of Cineworld cinema group, which operates 9,189 screens under the Regal brand in the US and as Cineworld elsewhere. Despite their screens being shuttered from January to May 2021 because of the pandemic, the group recovered from a $3 billion loss in 2020 to a $70 million loss. Revenues soared to $1.8 billion.
This was largely due to blockbusters like No Time to Die and Spider-Man: No Way Home in the last quarter of the year. After the results were announced, Cineworld CEO, Mooky Greidinger, made a presentation to all the top international financial institutions. One thing he said stuck with me. “We must say that it’s very rare to have one quarter with mega blockbusters, which are Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in early May, Top Gun: Maverick end of May, and Jurassic World Dominion in the middle of June,” said Greidinger. “So, really, a great quarter is coming ahead of us.”
Until Greidinger put it so bluntly, I hadn’t even begun thinking in terms of summer blockbuster releases. I remember putting together a list of films to look forward to at the end of 2021, then omicron struck. I had an inkling of the riches to come when I went to watch The Batman in IMAX on its opening weekend. Every seat was taken and apart from me and my companion, and very few others, all were gloriously unmasked and pretending, like most world governments, that Covid-19 is over.
Trailers for Top Gun: Maverick and Jurassic World Dominion caused much excitement as did a slide for RRR, which is playing around the world as you read this. Unless there is another severe wave of the latest variant, it seems to say that people will throng cinemas to watch films again. That said, people rushed to cinemas at the height of omicron for Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Continuing his presentation, Greidinger pointed out the blockbuster delights in store for the second half of the year, including Minions 2: The Rise of Gru, Thor: Love and Thunder, Bullet Train, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Strange World, Puss in Boots 2: The Last Wish, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and of course the long-awaited Avatar 2. The industry wants these and indeed every theatrical release everywhere to be hits.
The world wants to put the last two pandemic-blighted years behind and return to whatever normal is these days. And except for some despots who seem hell-bent on WWIII, everyone wants peace. Will we get it? Can the film world’s great and the good who settle into their plush seats at the Cannes Palais for the world premiere of Top Gun: Maverick and the subsequent Tom Cruise retrospective be able to return to the world of film commerce as a war rages to their north? As Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.”
Naman Ramachandran is a journalist and author of Rajinikanth: The Definitive Biography, and tweets @namanrs
