Entertainment
The impact of the 1918 flu pandemic on movie theaters
With over $700 million in revenue, Spider-Man: No Coming Home has an unusually important cinematic moment in the post-COVID world. Since last weekend (01/23/22), Deadline reported the film reached #6 in the all-time worldwide box office and had grossed $1.69 billion, inspiring Saturday Night Live Sketch in which alternate Joe Biden shows attribute the national rise in coronavirus cases to the fact that every human in the country has seen Spider Man.
Joking aside, Spider Man is the first film in a long time to suggest a return to pre-pandemic box office numbers and theater attendance. The movies have been hard blow by two years of pandemic pressures, resulting in hybrid releases, “theatre-at-home” streaming arrangements and the closure of many cinemas. After the 1918-19 flu pandemic, which also hit movies hard, the film industry responded with change and a strong comeback to cinema. Will our current environment and its consequences cause the same type of change?
The year 1918 should have been a good year for the cinema. War movies and newsreels had the cinemas buzzing (film was considered a vital industry “in World War I America), and as the war drew to a close, there was every reason to s expect a busy fall season in the entertainment industry. But, after its initial discovery among the military in the spring and an initial wave of mild infection, the flu settled on the east coast in September 1918. Spreading west in the kind of six- to eight-week spurts that have become all too familiar to us today, the pandemic roared across the United States and caused nearly two hundred thousand dead in the month of October alone.
If attendance didn’t dwindle on its own as the flu raged through a given community, theater closures would eventually prevent people from going to the movies. According to the filmmaker Richard Koszarsky, Health officials would eventually order movie theaters and other places of entertainment to close, as well as schools, churches and (more rarely) shops.
In October 1918, the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry decides to abandon production as much as possible, to stop the release of all new feature film subjects and to limit exchange activities to the immediate broadcast of serials. and news weeklies. The shutdown was necessary from an economic as well as a public health standpoint: the American film industry was a chain of relationships between the studios that made movies, the exhibitors that showed them, and the ticket-buying public, and the pandemic affected them. all materially. If the studios weren’t churning out movies at the usual pace and there was no one around to pay for the print rental, let alone buy a ticket, the industry was at its wit’s end.
For cities where theaters were still open, distributors encouraged reruns of old films already in stock and offered to make back-catalogue films available to theater owners. In November 1918, the industry publication world of cinema reported that the official release of Response from the Americas, a new World War I Propaganda Documentary produced by the Public Information Committee, would be delayed due to the nationwide flu epidemic and the fact that in many states previews will be interrupted by the closure of movie theaters.
Things didn’t look good for the future of the movie industry. A Boston theater owner lamented that the best five weeks of the year are those after Labor Day. The ban on taking came in the midst of this rushed affair, and the loss can never be recovered. Others in the industry worried that since those in lockdown had figured out they could enjoy their own evening by the fire, they might not even want to return to reopened theatres.
Nevertheless, the industry has recovered and not only recovered, but exploded in new and unexpected ways. Benjamin Hampton, in his history of the American film industry, writes that the studios had only a few weeks left to ditch the war reels, start filming romance and adventure stories, and capitalize on a post-war fun-loving audience who were either now without flu, be prepared to wear a mask. (Of course, producer Thomas Ince complained that [masks] interfere to a great extent with smoking, but what are you going to do?).
This favored studio players with bold hearts and deep pockets. Primordial Adolf Zukors filled its coffers with money from Wall Street and bought or built first-run theaters in major cities across the country in an effort to control films from the sound stage to theater headquarters. Studios like the fledgling Disney, which did not own movie theaters, were at a distinct disadvantage in this system; and influential stars like Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford responded by forming their own United Artists Consortium. (A 1948 trial before the Supreme Court would prohibit this practice of vertical integration as a stranglehold on film production and distribution.)
In the aftermath of the 1918–19 flu pandemic, the motion picture industry responded with the structural changes that became the major studio system. We may be seeing a similar industry shift underway today, as COVID realities evolve and hybrid streaming and experiential theater experiences become more mainstream. It’s hard to know exactly what will happen, but we do know that once again, a pandemic has irrevocably altered the nature of the industry and its relationship with the public.
Resources
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By: Richard Koszarsky
History of Cinema, Vol. 17, no. 4, outdated, neglected or underestimated (2005), pp. 466-485
Indiana University Press
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