By John Podhoretz
I n the spring, the most successful theatrical release in the United States was a horror movie you’ve probably never heard of. Not only was it No. 1 at the time... The Wretched even matched Black Panther ’s record, sitting for five weeks at the top of the box-office charts. Of course, there were a few differences... The Wretched opened at 12 theaters on the first of May and eventually made it onto 75 screens; Black Panther opened on 4,020 screens in 2018. There are 41,000 screens in the United States, and in 2019, they generated around $11 billion in revenue. In May 2020, 97% of the movie theaters in America were shuttered... The Wretched played exclusively at drive-ins, of which there are only 559 in the United States. By the first week of June, The Wretched had earned $905,000. In the same 35-day period in 2019, another Marvel superhero movie, Avengers: Endgame , had grossed $309 million. The movie business had gone into a societally induced coma, and what it lost during its insensibility might prove to be far more than a fiscal quarter’s revenue. Consider this... AMC, the largest theater chain in the world, announced at the beginning of June 2020 that it had “substantial doubt” it could survive as a business. The mass entertainment industry began
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American Consequences
23
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