“M&A is in our DNA,” he told the Standard: “But this next six to 12 months will be exclusively focused on the company, not M&A activity.”
Vue went into the crisis with trading at record levels before takings fell to zero for the lockdown months. “We were literally on fire going into this thing,” he said.
The fightback will be rapid, however, he predicted, with attendances back up to 90% of pre-covid levels by January with big new releases in the coming months such as the final Daniel Craig James Bond movie, Marvel’s Black Widow with Scarlett Johansson and Wonder Woman 1984.
Richards, a former Warner Brothers executive, praised movie studios for cooperating with cinema chains through Covid and holding back nearly all their launches. But he said they should now relax the normal trend of launching their new releases simultaneously across the world.
While simultaneous releases make for a bigger Box Office bang for the marketing buck and prevent piracy, covid shutdowns in some markets but not others meant they were no longer practical.
He said he understood Disney’s decision to launch its movies Trolls and Mulan on its Disney Plus channel rather than in cinemas because it was proving difficult to find a release date in the packed forthcoming schedule. “They had no choice. Anybody would have done the same thing,” he said.
Overall takings would fall on those films, however, as movies need cinema releases to get the “bump” that translates into bigger streaming and terrestrial TV sales, he said.
