UK's oldest cinema reopens after 'biggest existential crisis' ever faced by the industry

The phone at The Electric cinema in Birmingham had barely stopped ringing. People wanted to know one thing: when could they come back? After nearly 22 months of silence, the answer was finally yes — this week, the doors of Britain's oldest cinema swung open again.

The Electric first welcomed an audience in 1909, and in the century-plus since, it has survived two world wars, the rise of television, the VHS revolution, and the multiplex boom. Nothing, though, quite prepared the industry for what the pandemic brought. Kevin Markwick, who took over The Electric last year and also runs The Uckfield Picture House in East Sussex, has spent his entire working life in cinema. He says he has never been as frightened for the industry's survival as he was over the past two years.

The fear was not just financial, though the finances were brutal enough. With no ticket sales and fixed costs still mounting, venues like The Electric bled money through every month of closure. But there was a deeper anxiety too. When Universal sent Trolls World Tour straight to streaming in April 2020 — the first major studio film to bypass its planned theatrical release — it felt like a signal. The distributors, as Markwick puts it, moved toward home entertainment with what he called indecent haste. The question hanging over every cinema owner was whether there would even be a steady supply of films to show when they were eventually allowed to reopen.

The numbers tell the story of the damage plainly. In 2019, UK box office revenue topped £1.25 billion. In 2020, it collapsed to just under £300 million. The following year brought some recovery — revenue climbed back above £556 million — but cinemas were still shuttered for several months of that year, and the figure remained less than half of what the industry had earned before the pandemic arrived. The delayed release of No Time to Die, the latest Bond film, offered the first real sign that audiences were willing to return. Spider-Man: No Way Home reinforced that hope.

Roger Shannon, a visiting professor of British Cinema Histories at Birmingham City University, sees the streaming surge not as a death sentence but as a complication the industry can navigate. He argues that the pandemic accelerated a technological shift that was already underway, and that the growing presence of streaming platforms has actually brought new investment into studio infrastructure in the UK. In his view, the appetite for cinema has not disappeared — it has simply been suppressed. He expects it to return, carried by new ways of telling stories and new technologies for telling them.

Markwick agrees, and frames the case for cinema in the most human terms possible: no matter how large your television gets, there are things a living room cannot replicate. His daughter Katie, who manages The Electric day to day, goes further. She does not see streaming as a competitor so much as a parallel experience — a different thing entirely. Watching a film in a cinema, she says, is communal in a way that watching one at home simply is not. The shared laughter, the collective held breath, the atmosphere that builds in a darkened room full of strangers — that is what a screen on a wall cannot manufacture.

But Katie Markwick is also clear-eyed about what the cinema needs to thrive. The films that were delayed or diverted during the pandemic years need to finally arrive in theaters, and they need to arrive there first — not simultaneously on a streaming platform. The industry's recovery depends in large part on decisions being made by studios and distributors, not by cinema owners.

For now, The Electric is simply glad to be open. The response from Birmingham has been warm enough to exceed even Katie's expectations. The phone keeps ringing. People keep asking when they can come back. The answer, at last, is now.