Stay-at-home orders, capacity limits and simple fear of the virus have kept crowds away from the movies for nearly a year. The good news?

The picture could hardly look more different in Asia trib.al/n7EPr7u
🇨🇳In China, the take for the first 10 days of January surged more than 50% over the same period last year.

🇯🇵In Japan, Imax is reporting record weekend attendance.

🇮🇳🇹🇼From India to Taiwan, there’s been a similar surge in theater-going trib.al/n7EPr7u
Although Covid-19 worries had plagued the region’s movie business at the start of the pandemic, audiences are now piling back into theaters and spurring record box-office hauls.

Is there anything the U.S. could learn from this unexpected feel-good tale? trib.al/n7EPr7u
American theaters weren’t in good shape even before the pandemic.

The rise of streaming was eating into an industry that was increasingly dependent on a small number of blockbusters. In 2019, U.S. ticket sales fell by 4.4% to $11.4 billion trib.al/n7EPr7u
As the pandemic set in, studios began pulling back and delaying big-budget releases, including a new James Bond film

By mid-March almost every U.S. theater screen was dark, with no timetable for re-opening. All told, it threatened to be a mortal blow trib.al/n7EPr7u
With audiences stuck at home, subscriptions to streaming services increased by more than 50%.

The film industry agonized that customers might never want to return to crowded auditoriums with overpriced popcorn trib.al/n7EPr7u
As Asia has shown, though, those worries were almost certainly premature.

Just as in the U.S., theaters in Asia-Pacific closed thanks to Covid, and there was plenty of pessimism about their prospects for re-opening. But then a few things went right trib.al/n7EPr7u
One critical factor was a competent coronavirus response from many regional governments, including:

🧪Mass testing
🥼Adequate protective gear
🗺️Contact tracing
🚪Tough quarantine measures
✈️Early travel restrictions
😷Widespread compliance with masking
trib.al/n7EPr7u
But a massive factor was a surge in good local films.

🇨🇳China’s “The Eight Hundred” became the world’s top-grossing movie
🇯🇵Japan’s “Demon Slayer” grossed $337 million (fifth place globally)
🇰🇷South Korea’s “Peninsula” was a huge regional hit
trib.al/n7EPr7u
In a down year, the Asia-Pacific region accounted for about 51% of global ticket sales, compared to 41% in 2019.

By the end of 2020, Chinese sales had surpassed $3 billion — enough to top the U.S. for the first time trib.al/n7EPr7u
For U.S. movie theaters, that should actually be welcome news.

As vaccines roll out, and Americans venture back into the public, Hollywood will be waiting for them with an unprecedented backlog of big-budget films competing for their attention and wallets trib.al/n7EPr7u

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More from @bopinion

23 Jan
The Covid-19 pandemic has ravaged Hong Kong’s economy.

It has also brought to light an enduring problem: Too many, in one of the world’s richest cities, live in informally partitioned homes no bigger than a parking space trib.al/XLjkuWJ
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From 1926 to 2006, the cheapest 30% of U.S. stocks outpaced the most expensive 30% by 4.5 percentage points a year, including dividends trib.al/jLadBxA
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Donald Trump might already be ineligible to serve as president of the United States in the future.

That’s true even without an impeachment process that ends with a formal ban from future public office trib.al/MWUG8t3
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The first part of this provision certainly applies to Trump trib.al/MWUG8t3 Image
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The fight against Covid-19 looks particularly hopeless right now, with new variants threatening to make the pandemic worse before mass vaccination makes it better.

But some of the new vaccines offer hope — and not just that the pandemic will end trib.al/7GO3Z0X
It looks increasingly plausible that the same weapons we’ll use to defeat Covid-19 can also vanquish even grimmer reapers — including cancer, which kills almost 10 million people a year trib.al/7GO3Z0X
The most promising Covid vaccines use nucleic acids called mRNA.

They instruct the body to create the same proteins that wrap around the viral RNA of SARS-CoV-2. The immune system then familiarizes itself with the proteins ahead of potential infection trib.al/7GO3Z0X
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