After months of lockdown, there’s finally a wonderful news coming your way! All the theatre lovers, you’re in for a BIG SURPRISE!
Information and Broadcasting Ministry (I&B) has recommended to the Union Home Ministry that cinema halls will be allowed to reopen in August, all over the country. I&B Secretary, Amit Khare, indicated this at a closed-door industry interaction with the CII Media Committee, on 24th July. To ensure utmost safety, cinema halls are suggested to make alternate seats available in one row and the next row to be empty. This will be done throughout the theatre in same fashion. Amit Khare also said that they will take into consideration the two-metre social distancing norm and follow it as much is possible. The Home Ministry, however, still has to revert on the recommendation.
However, this recommendation was not well received by cinema owners. The ones present in this interaction do not consider this as a good idea and feel that keeping theatres shut is much better than running them in one fourth of the total capacity. Few of the attendees present included media CEOs like N.P. Singh (Sony), Sam Balsara (Madison), Megha Tata (Discovery), Gaurav Gandhi (Amazon Prime), Manish Maheshwari (Twitter), S. Sivakumar (Bennett Coleman and Co Ltd), and K. Madhavan (Star & Disney), and also Chairman of CII Media Committee.
Earlier, the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry had put forward to bring under its purview, the contents being streamed on the several over-the-top (OTT) platforms. As we have seen in the past two months, a number of filmmakers have announced digital releases of their movies on platforms like Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Disney+Hotstar. Some of them have been released while some will be releasing in near future. Now, with this recommendation by I&B, there is going to be a serious disorder! Chances are that filmmakers will regret their decision and maybe streamers will fear a threat to their platform’s profitability. Whatever it is, you, as a viewer, can be happy because your very own theatres will soon be back in action! But yes, please be safe and wise.
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