“Video” (V) tag

What? There are no reasons to think people won't go to the cinema anymore? Seriously? O, right, let us just totally ignore the possibility of cinemas being closed down by the force of law! I hope the situation at hand doesn't come to that, but such a thing is a real possibility even if the cumulative probability is currently now. We should all be keeping an eye out for public executives who have a penchant for getting carried away with quarantine proclamations.

I wish I could, but in some ways, it wouldn't even be appropriate, because a tyrant or a coward is going to come to power, regardless of his or her partisan affiliation. The new politics of Michigan might have gone down differently had Rick Snyder not been branded as responsible for certain governmental faux pas. Worse yet, an entire philosophical idea in regards to civics was kind of hurt, in that quite possibly both public sector and private sector can be equally inept or corrupt. He was lucky to even come to power, seeing as how Michigan voters had for decades consistently declined to do more to vote out the two individuals who were United States senators from Michigan at the time.

Hi Jeorj, I can't imagine the force of law being able to close down theaters in the majority of countries for a long amount of time (let's say more than six months). Currently in the country I live (the Netherlands) theaters are closed by law because of Covid-19, but this happened before in April or May or something and after that they opened again (edit: I even went to a film festival in October). I expect theaters in the Netherlands to be open again somewhere in February, or perhaps March. And then a lot of people will be going to the cinema again. I don't think the current situation will end cinema-going.

Closing, reopening, closing again and then reopening again, so on and so forth, until there the case fatality rate (which the Democratic Party emphasizes) or the infection fatality rate (which the Republicans Party emphasizes), associated with one virus or another, is arbitrarily low enough; or until humanity actually develops a preparedness in regards to contagious respiratory diseases which have existed for eons. Prior to the outbreak, countless virologists expected the next superbug to be a strain of influenza, not coronaviruses. That's not even what matters here, though. There are complicated forces that determine whether or not the public officials will make drastic decisions "for the public good", regardless of understanding or expertise on what particular thing of which they are scared shitless. The bottom line is that entertainment often considered the farthest things from essential.

I have to say I don't share your pessimism Jeorj. That said, given the current situation regarding Covid-19 in your country (based on your posts I assume you live in the USA, where more than 20 million people have been diagnosed with the disease and over 350,000 have died from it), I can understand you might be, let's say, a bit gloomy.

But, the USA is one country out of about 190 (and not the one with the biggest number of feature films made per year, I might add), so basing an opinion of a worldwide phenomenon (the possible death of cinema) on the situation in one single country, might not be the best predictor of the future.

I only suggested lockdown or "quarantine" (even if not for a sound reason) as a highly-credible possibility, especially considering how we don't what new superbugs may emerge, be them in the coronavirus family, the influenza family or one the less likely ones. SARS-Cov-2 is likely to have successor (descendant) of some kind, but hopefully less deadly (slower to spread or slower to terminally wound). Some of the politicians don't care about how low the actual threat is, and they will order closures until they have nothing at all to point to as an excuse for it. If the trend of suspending cinemas (et al.) even if for only half of a year's time continues in the years to come, we may have an economic problem out of the ordinary. Some kind of massive stimulus would invariably be demanded (to restore the countless tiny companies that have gone out of business), but also the legislature of the United States would likely be deadlocked, especially considering that at no time during the outbreak did the federal government overall really push for any law or order that would suspend anybody's ability to turn a profit. This is always awkward when the federal government has to monetarily compensate citizens and people for the harms created by state governments, or vice versa.

By the way, the following is a little bit of information about the "United States of America" not ordinarily acknowledged in the media and which might conflict with what most schoolchildren are taught:

I only suggested 

When you stated "There are no reasons to think people won't go to the cinema anymore? Seriously?" I figured you meant to say that there are definitely reasons to think people won't go to the cinema anymore. I don't agree with that, that's all. But if you only meant to say that lock-downs and/or quarantines (can) happen, yeah, then we're in total agreement. And yes, these are of course hard on cinema's, but that doesn't mean all cinema's around the globe (which also includes countries with politicians that actually DO care about the people and the exact status of the virus, by the way) will shut their doors permanently in the next few years.

Cinema's have survived two world wars, the rise of television, the rise (and decline) of VHS + DVD, Britney Spears' Crossroads and the rise of streaming services. At this point, I see no reason to declare movie theaters dead or dying. That's all.

People won't go if they can't go, regardless of the desire for it.

Except for massive numbers of specific individuals and some corporate entities, I'm not aware of anything that didn't survive the world wars, which did involve curfews, blackouts, rationing and destruction, sure. Just about everything rebounded, especially the human population figure. It doesn't mean anything for commercial auditoriums to have survived a war. As for VHS, optical discs and streaming services, none of these things ever deprived people of the very choice to go to the movies.

In the old fashioned terminology, "film" and "video" did refer to the physical medium (and technique), but over time, film has come to connote feature-length movies whereas video has come to connote short movies, even though there are plenty of short films and feature-length videos. The fact of whether or not a movie was distributed to and screened in cinema houses never necessarily had everything to do with the medium, except that most of them only used film stock as the playback medium, until the point in history whereby multiple playback media, including film stock, became normal.