Last Reel for Regal: How a Global Cinema Titan Flickered Out While the World Streamed On

Regal Cinema: The Fall of a Global Colossus, or How the World Learned to Love Watching Alone

The curtain finally dropped on Regal Cinema this month, and the planet responded with the same polite applause it reserves for a cancelled flight: a collective shrug, a swipe to the next screen. Once the largest cinema chain outside China’s state-curated multiplexes, Regal’s dimming lights are less a local bankruptcy and more a planetary signpost—like the polar ice caps, only with more popcorn butter. From Lagos to Lisbon, audiences who once queued for the latest Marvel behemoth now queue for Wi-Fi, streaming the same film in their kitchens while arguing over whose turn it is to buy the microwave samosas. Progress, evidently, smells faintly of artificial cheese.

In London, where Regal’s parent company Cineworld is headquartered, executives explained the collapse by blaming “challenging market headwinds,” which is corporate argot for “nobody wants to pay parking, babysitters, and £9 for lukewarm Pepsi anymore.” Analysts in Mumbai nodded sympathetically, then pointed out that Indian multiplexes are thriving precisely because they sell Pepsi, paneer tikka, and a devotional song-and-dance number all in the same breath. Cultural relativism at its finest: the West loses its temples of celluloid while the East upgrades them to air-conditioned cathedrals with cup-holders for lassis.

Zoom out and the pattern looks almost geopolitical. China’s Wanda Group—owner of AMC until it quietly ghosted that investment—now builds 1,000-screen complexes the way the Pentagon builds drone bases: rapidly, ruthlessly, and with flag-planting ceremony. Meanwhile, American suburbs are littered with boarded-up megaplexes that look like abandoned space stations, their IMAX screens flapping in the wind like surrender flags to the algorithm. One almost expects a UN peacekeeping force to be deployed between Netflix and the Motion Picture Association, though blue helmets would clash with the Dolby Atmos carpet.

Europe, ever the museum continent, has turned some Regal sites into “immersive experience centers,” which means teenagers pay to stand in a room while Van Gogh’s sunflowers swirl around them in 360 degrees. It’s cinema without actors, plot, or, crucially, other humans—the logical endpoint of a civilization that prefers its art like its politics: solitary, curated, and instantly skippable. Critics call it democratization; the rest of us call it Friday night with the algorithm and a bottle of supermarket wine.

The human cost is, of course, conveniently measured in discounted gift cards. Thirty-six thousand jobs evaporated overnight, from Sunderland to Sacramento, but LinkedIn tells us they’re all “pivoting to content creation,” a phrase that translates to filming themselves crying in their cars for TikTok sympathy. In Argentina, former ushers now hustle seats at secret “club cines,” underground screenings where projectors run off diesel generators and the admission fee is whatever pesos haven’t yet been devoured by 200% inflation. Black markets, like cockroaches, survive nuclear winter and streaming wars alike.

And yet. In war-scarred Kyiv, a single Regal-branded screen reopened last week, powered by a Starlink dish and sheer defiance. Tickets are free; the program is whatever DVDs volunteers could scavenge. Watching Top Gun: Maverick while real jets thunder overhead is either the height of absurdity or the pinnacle of human resilience—opinions vary by shell crater. One patron told the BBC it felt “almost normal.” That, perhaps, is the final irony: the global empire that once sold escapism now survives only where escape is impossible.

So the lights go down on Regal, and the world’s screens multiply like viruses in the dark. We have never watched more, yet shared less; never been so cinematically saturated, yet so culturally dehydrated. Somewhere, a projector flickers its last reel, the bulb pops, and the ushers sweep up enough dropped popcorn to feed a small nation—if only nations ate nostalgia by the bucket. The credits roll, the emergency lights come up, and we shuffle toward the exits, blinking into the harsh fluorescence of whatever streaming dystopia awaits. Curtain.