Deadline‘s Tom Grater speaking to Gerard Lemoine, owner of indie venue Cinepal in Palaiseau, a suburb south of Paris:
“Lemoine explained that he decided to make the video to express his frustration after hearing about Disney’s decision to go straight to Disney Plus. He said that he has been promoting Mulan ‘for months’ and that he and his fellow operators had hoped the film would be a key title to boost their re-opening efforts. Cinemas re-opened in France in June, and Lemoine admitted it has been an uphill battle since then to attract audiences, even in the famously cinema-hungry nation.
“It’s really a huge effort to stay open right now for most of us, but we were assuming there would be some ambitious movie releases in the coming weeks,” he said. “By losing Mulan, we lost the possibility of offering our audiences a long-awaited film that would have helped us after these past hard weeks. It is also a bad message to send to the public [who had been expecting a theatrical release].”
La réaction d’un exploitant suite à la décision de Disney… #Mulan pic.twitter.com/I2uWICofve
— Destination Ciné (@destinationcine) August 6, 2020
