No Time To Die and Spider-Man: No Way Home come to the rescue of Cineworld’s 2021 end of year results…
After what’s routinely described as, well, a difficult couple of years for the cinema industry, numbers coming out of Cineworld suggest that a turnaround is very nearly there. The firm has reported its 2021 figures, and that make happier reading than 2020’s.
In 2020, the firm reported income of just over $850m, a huge fall on the year before that’s explainable given that cinemas were shut for most of the year. They were closed too for the first chunk of 2021, but in the end the big blockbuster movies came though. First there was the return of James Bond in No Time To Die, and then its records were duly smashed in December by the performance of Spider-Man: No Way Home.
These helped bring revenues to $1.8bn in 2021, although a lot of that was inevitably fuelled by two huge blockbusters. It wasn’t until the final quarter of the year that things dramatically turned around, and other exhibitors are likely to report the same thing as their results dribble in.
Cineworld still made a sizeable loss last year (its loss was $708.3m), and isn’t yet at 50% of what it was bringing through its tills pre-Covid. But as its CEO, Mooky Gredinger, said in a statement, “whilst our 2021 results still reflect the impacts of Covid-19, particularly at the start of the financial year, we are encouraged by the recent strong trading performance throughout the final quarter”.
A big line of upcoming blockbusters, led by a collection of Marvel films, Jurassic World: Dominion and Top Gun Maverick, should make for a solid summer. Fingers crossed that it doesn’t all go wrong again…
https://www.screendaily.com/news/cineworld-revenue-up-nearly-1bn-in-2021-as-losses-narrow/5168712.article
