All theatres, gyms, temple and all other public places in Tamil Nadu will remain closed from April 26 as per the new set of guidelines issued by the state government on Saturday to tackle the second wave of Covid-19. The new guidelines were announced after the state reported one lakh active cases of Covid-19 on Friday.
This will be a second hit to the cinema halls, after the nationwide lockdown in March 2020.
“Neither the Centre nor the state government is supporting the cinema industry,” Tiruppur Subramaniam, president of the Tamil Nadu Theatre and Multiplex Owners’ Association told Silverscreen India.
“The government has the right to declare a lockdown but they are not giving any subsidies to our industry. They are not giving exemptions on either electricity bills or land tax. They want that we pay our employees full salaries. How can we do that? We have never opposed the government but whenever they declared a lockdown, they understood the businessmen’s sufferings and made some exemptions,” Subramaniam said.
Subramaniam mentioned that the employees will be paid 50% of their salaries during this period.
Over the past few weeks, several states issued lockdown-like guidelines with night curfews and weekend lockdowns. While Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu shut down all public places, Delhi chose to keep theatres functioning at 30% capacity.
“It’s been over 13 months and we have run the cinemas for only two or three months and that too within restrictions and a cap on capacity. Moreover, the government is not bearing the interest amount that is levied by the banks,” Subramaniam said.
Although theatres were allowed to reopen from mid-October 2020, restricting the seating capacity to 50% and additional charges for frequent sanitisation prevented several theatres from resuming business. It compelled many theatres to shut down permanently.
“Since then, only a few big films released after January. While these films paid some good amount to the owners, they did not garner a great collection. Master was the last film to give us good collection,” Subramaniam said.
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Vijay’s Master was the first big-banner film to release in January, reportedly with a 100% capacity despite the Centre’s warning against it and the state issuing guidelines. Despite the release of big commercial films like Karthi’s Sulthan, Dhanush’s Karnan and Godzilla vs Kong, the situation remained grim. Silverscreen India had reported earlier that the Tamil version of the Christopher Nolan film kept the cinemas afloat but could not bridge the gap caused by the restricted capacity.
“Now there are no releases. We will only be able to understand the situation once the halls reopen. There have been three releases so far and we have made some collections from those releases only,” Subramaniam said.