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Comment by jdhawk | Hacker News Reader

This is mostly a restructuring to shed some debt before a big capital infusion.

Alamo's business model in a post-pandemic world is still a huge money maker.

There are some big uncertainties though. For example, now that studios can own theaters I wouldn't be surprised to see Disney buy one of the chains to show only their movies. It would be a huge problem for Alamo and other chains if they didn't get Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar movies at the same time as a Disney-owned theater would.

I would really really hope that kind of acquisition would get killed by the DoJ (FTC?) on anti-trust concerns. But who knows...

One of the strengths of Alamo is that they do showings for indie films and have weekly nights of older films. So cheaper to screen these and they make bank on the food and drinks.

And the biggest part for me is they have ZERO commercials while you're waiting for it to start. They show silly bumpers, youtube clips and internal promos.

> For example, now that studios can own theaters I wouldn't be surprised to see Disney buy one of the chains to show only their movies.

DOJ vacated the consent decree on studios owning theaters, but that doesn't mean that a studio exclusively screening its films at its own theaters will be allowed.

I kind of doubt there will be a big investment in studio owned theaters anyway. Maybe studios will pick up some of the closing locations to make sure there's a theater within reasonable drive of everyone, and maybe some flagship theaters in Hollywood.

I could imagine Disney owning their own theaters could be quite profitable for them.

I can't find an online source for this, but a decade ago I heard that the IFC Center in NYC was the most profitable (per-screen) cinema in the US, due to IFC Films already being the distributor of the films they show -- so no added distribution costs.

Then again, they've also controversially used non-union projectionists, so this might have just been a talking point on one side of that debate.

> DOJ vacated the consent decree on studios owning theaters, but that doesn't mean that a studio exclusively screening its films at its own theaters will be allowed.

Who's going to stop them? "We're pro-business" says both R and D.

Presumably the owners will walk away from this restructuring with nothing.

You're assuming the myriad petty government tyrants will give up the control over our lives that they've seized. Let me know how that works out for you - history shows that never happens without violence.

It's happened in the US in the past after previous crisis.

I don't understand the line of thinking that goes that the government WANTS to destroy businesses and economic activity and reduce their own tax base, income, and ability to operate...

I think there are good reasons to be skeptical. The USA PATRIOT act was rushed through congress in a previous crisis and it took nearly 20 years before it stopped being reauthorized.

I think your comparison misses the fact that COVID measures are largely decentralized because they require the agreement and participation of everyday people to be effective whereas the PATRIOT act centralized authority and control. As a result, the COVID measures basically lack enforcement mechanisms that could continue to exists after the pandemic ends.

It's an odd strain of thinking, where everything is compared to Nazi-era Germany except the actual current fascism.

They dont want it. But the incentive structure that determines if they get elected or not is set up in a way that makes supporting wealth creation a disadvantage

You said a lot of wild things without any real assertions.

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