US entertainment industry reels from industry-wide impact of COVID-19

Cinema and film festivals

Social distancing rules are forcing theaters to take a beating, with 50 percent caps on attendance and partial closures over much of the United States, with mandatory closures in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and other cities that began on the ill-fated Ides of March.

AMC and Regal have closed all their theaters nationwide, while Cineplex has actively reduced the number of tickets sold per theater to create social distancing between seated patrons.

Theater employees are often young people just entering the workforce and thousands of them are vulnerable to layoffs until theaters reopen.

Top indie festivals, South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, Texas and Tribeca Film Festival in New York have been shuttered, throwing local vendors and the indie film industry into financial stress and chaos as they scrambled to find other sales and screening options. Stage 32, a US-based social network and educational site with 400,000 creative professional members who work in film, television and theater has picked up some of the slack, giving SXSW filmmakers the opportunity to screen their films on their online platform.