It’s been a tough time for the movie business.
The 2023 actors and writers strikes brought production to a standstill, leaving studios with fewer films to release in theaters. That’s bad news for cinemas, which are struggling to dig out from the financial hole left by COVID shutdowns and laboring to get audiences to visit the multiplexes at the numbers they were before the pandemic. Add to that a series of commercial disappointments, such as “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” “The Fall Guy” and “If,” and the industry is off to a very rough start to the summer movie season, a time of year when the box office is supposed to be booming.