Cinema Paradiso (1895-2020); Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (2021-??)

AMC — The nation’s largest theater chain is on life support right now. The pandemic has crippled the cinema business, and AMC, in particular, is feeling the pain, with the company warning investors it could run out of cash by early 2021.

After seeing its share price drop 70% this year, AMC is now worth less than $350 million. Amazon was rumored to be looking at a potential AMC acquisition last year, and that could still be an option moving forward. The tech giant would grab more than 1,000 theaters in the deal, but also billions of dollars in debt in the process. With multiple vaccines rolling out, coupled with the relative success of “Wonder Woman 1984” in theaters over the Christmas weekend, things could be finally looking up for decimated theater chains — making AMC more attractive than it was even six months ago, when the Amazon rumors were floating around.

“In the current health crisis, where movie theatres are shuttered or attendance is drastically limited because of the global pandemic, I still have hope bordering on certainty that when it’s safe, audiences will go back to the movies. I’ve always devoted myself to our movie-going community — movie-going, as in leaving our homes to go to a theatre, and community, meaning a feeling of fellowship with others who have left their homes and are seated with us. In a movie theatre, you watch movies with the significant others in your life, but also in the company of strangers. That’s the magic we experience when we go out to see a movie or a play or a concert or a comedy act. We don’t know who all these people are sitting around us, but when the experience makes us laugh or cry or cheer or contemplate, and then when the lights come up and we leave our seats, the people with whom we head out into the real world don’t feel like complete strangers anymore. We’ve become a community, alike in heart and spirit, or at any rate alike in having shared for a couple of hours a powerful experience. That brief interval in a theatre doesn’t erase the many things that divide us: race or class or belief or gender or politics. But our country and our world feel less divided, less fractured, after a congregation of strangers have laughed, cried, jumped out their seats together, all at the same time. Art asks us to be aware of the particular and the universal, both at once. And that’s why, of all the things that have the potential to unite us, none is more powerful than the communal experience of the arts.”

All Cinemagic movie theaters in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts are closings their doors for good after more than 20 years.

“To the thousands of ‘Cinemagicians’ who have joined us in providing the magic of movies on the big screen over the past two decades and the generations of movie goers who we have served, we thank you for being part of our family. It has been an honor and a privilege to provide our communities with the magic of cinema, said Zyacorp Entertainment in a press release. Zyacorp Entertainment operated the Cinemagic theaters.