New York City Flooding Forces Cinema Closures Including AMC – Update

Anthony D'Alessandro
·2 min read

UPDATED: We are hearing that AMC is closing its New York City metro-area theaters early Friday including biggies Lincoln Square, 84th Street and the Empire 25. There goes the market’s box office. The number of theaters closed now are around 20, we hear.

PREVIOUSLY, 11:58 AM: Despite high waters in Brooklyn and Queens causing Alamo Drafthouse’s New York City circuit to close as well as National Amusements Showcase in the Bronx, big chains AMC and Regal are expected to stay open, particularly in Midtown.

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Typically whenever there’s a hurricane in the southeast part of the U.S., we see a massive number of multiplexes shuttering, but that’s not the case here despite the heavy rains and flooding in Gotham.

As such, on the busiest weekend this fall since post-Labor Day with four wide releases — The Creator, Dumb Money, PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie and Saw X — distributors aren’t expecting the New York City box office to get wiped out. They remain in wait-and-see mode to see if people venture out, which is typical on rainy days in the Northeast.

We hear from AMC that they will remain open, but are monitoring the situation. Regal, too.

Among the Alamo theaters shuttered until a yet to be determined time are its Yonkers 6, Staten Island, Liberty 14 and Brooklyn sites.

This weekend by no means is expected to be like the penultimate weekend of 2016, when winter storm Jonas dumped as much as 30 inches of snow, forcing movie theaters to close. While we reported that bruised the box office at the time, the weekend wound up with over $113 million — a bountiful amount of cash for late January by post-pandemic standards.

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