Never Say Never Again: Regal Riverstone hopes to return

Never Say Never Again: Regal hopes to return

When the crew for "No Time To Die" finished filming in London on a late October night, they had no idea what damage the latest James Bond film would do to the Coeur d’Alene economy. But less than a year later, here we are: both shaken and stirred.

Of course, "No Time To Die" didn’t set out to throw a kidney punch to the North Idaho tourist town’s Riverstone district, and you could make the sound, strong and ultimately correct argument the fifth and final Daniel Craig installment in the iconic franchise didn’t actually throw the metaphorical punch. Nevertheless, a punch was thrown with the force and finality of Bond himself, landing over the weekend when Cinemark announced it was indefinitely shutting down all Regal theaters in the United States, Riverstone included.

Local Regal theater managers, as well as district management for Regal, declined to comment for this story, but word came down from the nation’s second-largest cinema chain over the weekend that all Regal U.S. operations would be suspended, starting Thursday.

"This is not a decision we made lightly,” Mooky Greidlinger, CEO of Cineworld, said in a statement. “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 theaters 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 theaters to the new protocols and cannot underscore enough how difficult this decision was.”

While local management would not confirm how many employees currently work at Regal Riverstone, the 536 theaters that will close this week impact approximately 45,000 jobs nationwide. Blaine Buckingham, for the moment, holds one of those jobs. He stood outside Regal Riverstone’s front doors Monday, handing out masks to customers in need of one.

“I’m bummed,” Buckingham said. “But I have something else lined up. I’ll be working construction, so I’ll be OK. But yeah, they’re saying it’s temporary.”

Thursday’s closure of Regal Riverstone will actually mark their second-such decision since the pandemic began. The first came in mid-March, just as the coronavirus swamped businesses, travel and — at the time — the nation’s health care capacity. That decision came amid a wave of warnings from health professionals and epidemiologists urging caution in a time of great uncertainty.

Over time, clarity replaced uncertainty and health protocols replaced shut-down orders. Eventually, Regal Riverstone emerged, as well, showing a few movies in late August through September that had just been released when COVID struck, as well as a few classics at a lower cost, taking a page from Hayden Cinema’s discount playbook. Regal opened what theaters it could under specific, crowd-limiting restrictions, knowing that the quickest way to shut down the in-person cinema business forever is to turn a Saturday matinee into a super-spreader event.

But when the curtains go down Thursday — temporarily, both local employees and Regal corporate spokespeople insist — it won’t be primarily out of COVID-19 concerns, but rather out of what the disease has left behind: Americans simply aren’t willing to go to the movies right now, and the inability to consistently produce movies at a steady clip means fewer products to sell its customers.

“We’re like a grocery store that doesn’t have vegetables, fruit or meat,” Greidlinger told the Wall Street Journal. “We cannot operate for a long time without a product.”

The alternative at-home streaming explosion pushed Universal Studios to lean its shoulder into the trend with "Trolls World Tour," a computer-animated sequel that opened both in theaters and on home digital the same April day. The film made $40 million in its opening weekend, only $60,000 coming from what few theaters could show it.

Disney soon followed suit: After postponing its release of "Mulan" from its March 27 date to July — then to August, then to September, then possibly eyeing a 2021 release — Disney instead altogether canceled its theater plans in lieu of releasing the live-action re-make on its streaming platform, Disney+, for $30.

Other studios held out — and continue to hold out — hope, kicking the can down the road into 2021, hoping a vaccine or a treatment or the acceptance of a new normal will assuage people’s anxiety about being in a room with strangers for two hours at a time. Blockbusters-to-be like "Top Gun: Maverick" and Marvel’s "Black Widow" have been postponed from last summer into the coming summer, when blockbusters shine their financially brightest. In the meantime, the business of producing big-money draws is slowly coming back, though Hollywood is leery about releasing those films now.

Which leads us back to Regal Riverstone and James Bond. Ironically, "No Time To Die" was first delayed from its initial November 2019 date to February 2020 and then April 2020 because of production delays. Once COVID hit in March and theaters closed, however, "No Time To Die" was delayed once again until Thanksgiving weekend. On Friday, after seeing lackluster box office returns for "Tenet," MGM and Universal — the production company and distributor of "No Time To Die," respectively — delayed the film once more, this time until April 2021.

On Saturday, less than 24 hours later, word started to trickle down from Regal’s employee union that all 536 theaters in the United States will temporarily but indefinitely close.