Ahead of what looks like a tough 2024 for cinemas, Vue has taken steps to safeguard its future with another debt restructure.
Thanks largely to the strikes which ravaged Hollywood in 2023, cinema operators were left counting the cost of a movie calendar shorn of a few big titles, such as Dune Part II, which was originally slated to release last November but will now be coming in March of this year.
If that didn’t make things tough enough for cinemas, there’s still the added pressure created by post-pandemic audiences not returning in the same numbers as those oft-quoted 2019 levels. Worse still, the after-effects of the strikes are expected to hit the Hollywood production pipeline, meaning that 2024 could be a year with an unusually low number of tentpole movies to support cinemas – Marvel, for example, only has a single film out this year: Deadpool 3.
It’s going to be a tricky year, and the worrying situation has led to Vue International, Europe’s largest cinema operator choosing to restructure its debt for the second time in 10 months. A year ago, the company employed a similar move which wiped out £470m of debt wiped out as the company was taken over by its lenders. Now, a year later it’s reported – by Screen Daily – that hundreds of millions of pounds of debt is also set to be wiped out as well as ‘£50m of capital being injected into the company.’
Happily, no cinemas are closing and no jobs will be lost. It’s set to be a tough year for cinemas, but hopefully Vue have pre-empted that forecast and are in good shape to face whatever the next 12 months brings. While it feels like we’re always looking to a better future, predictions for the global box office in 2025 are much healthier, so if cinema operators can endure 2024 then, hopefully, better times lie ahead.
Read more: The state of the cinema | How is the film industry looking in 2024?
