In Depth: China’s Silver Screens Lose Their Luster as Pandemic Grinds On

“After two bruising years, almost every movie theater in China is out of money,” says Liu Jianxin, a general manager at a Beijing movie theater management firm.

Liu says many cinemas shuttered due to the most recent Covid outbreaks could struggle to reopen.

From late March to late April, more than half of the country’s 12,000 movie theaters were closed due to pandemic control rules, figures from Alibaba-backed ticketing platform Dengta showed.