Every cinema in Australia closed in March and the industry counted what was left

On 23 March 2020, the National Cabinet announced that cinemas, along with pubs, clubs, gyms, and places of worship, would close indefinitely. By midnight, every one of Australia’s approximately 2,000 cinema screens was dark. The closure was immediate, nationwide, and without a reopening date.

The exhibition sector entered shutdown carrying significant fixed costs. The major chains, Event Cinemas (owned by Event Hospitality & Entertainment), Hoyts (owned by Wanda Group), and Village Cinemas (a joint venture between Village Roadshow and Event), collectively operate over 800 screens across metropolitan and regional locations. Their leases, staffing obligations, and maintenance costs do not pause when the projectors stop. Independent cinemas, roughly 200 sites across the country, faced the same equation at smaller scale and with thinner margins.

In the week before closure, Australian box office revenue had already collapsed. Per industry tracking data, national box office for the week ending 22 March was down approximately 70 per cent on the prior year’s equivalent week. Audiences had begun staying away before the government told them to.

The production freeze

The closure of cinemas was the visible event. The less visible one was the simultaneous halt to production activity across the country.

Screen Australia confirmed that at least 30 film and television productions were in active production or pre-production when shutdown orders took effect in the third week of March. Some were days from wrapping. Some had been shooting for weeks. Some were in early pre-production, with crews hired, locations scouted, and start dates imminent.

Productions that paused mid-shoot faced immediate insurance questions. Standard production insurance policies in Australia do not cover pandemic-related shutdowns. The cost of suspending a production, retaining key crew, storing sets, and maintaining equipment while waiting for clearance to resume, sits with the producer unless an insurer agrees otherwise. In March, no insurer was agreeing to anything.

The freelance workforce behind these productions, roughly 25,000 people employed in the Australian screen sector according to Screen Australia’s 2018-19 workforce data, entered a period of zero income with limited safety net. Screen industry workers are overwhelmingly engaged as contractors or on fixed-term agreements. JobKeeper, announced on 30 March, would eventually cover some of this workforce, but eligibility requirements excluded many sole traders and short-contract workers who form the backbone of film and television production.

Finished films with nowhere to go

A separate problem emerged for films that had completed production and were scheduled for theatrical release in the coming months. At least a dozen Australian features had confirmed 2020 release dates. With cinemas closed indefinitely, distributors faced a choice: hold the film and wait for reopening, or pivot to a digital release and forfeit the theatrical window that many financing agreements require.

The calculus is not simple. Theatrical release is not merely a revenue channel for Australian films. It is a condition of many funding agreements from Screen Australia, state screen agencies, and the Producer Offset. A film that bypasses theatrical release may fail to meet the terms under which it was financed, creating administrative and legal complications that extend well beyond the immediate crisis.

The government response, week one

In the first week after closure, the federal government’s screen-specific response was limited. The broader economic measures, notably the JobKeeper wage subsidy and the cash flow boost for small businesses, applied to parts of the sector but were not designed for it. Screen Australia released a statement acknowledging the impact and noting that it was “working with industry to assess the situation.” State screen agencies issued similar communications.

The $27 million Temporary Interruption Fund, which would eventually provide insurance-like cover for productions that could not obtain pandemic-related insurance on the open market, was still months away. In the last week of March 2020, the industry was operating without a net.

Exhibition staff, predominantly young and casually employed, were stood down across the country. Event Cinemas alone employs approximately 5,000 people across its Australian and New Zealand operations. Village Cinemas, Hoyts, Palace Cinemas, Dendy, and the independent sector account for thousands more. The scale of the stand-down was significant, immediate, and received comparatively little media attention alongside the broader employment crisis.

What the numbers looked like

The Australian box office in 2019 was $1.16 billion. The industry’s own projections for 2020, prepared before the pandemic, anticipated a similar figure. Those projections became meaningless on 23 March. The eventual 2020 box office total, once cinemas reopened in stages from June onwards, would be a fraction of the prior year’s figure. The exact number would depend on how long the closures lasted, how quickly audiences returned, and whether the Hollywood release calendar, which supplies the majority of Australian box office revenue, would deliver product to screens that were ready to show it.

None of those variables were known in the last week of March. What was known was this: every screen was dark, every production was stopped, and the industry was counting what was left.