As Victoria emerges from its long lockdown, cinemas, among the last businesses to reopen under the roadmap to recovery, are finally open to the public again. But how will they operate in a Covid-normal world? Have we learnt to live without them?

Right now there is a sudden glut of new content hitting the big screens. While people in other states have had the pleasure of going to the cinema for months, distributors have held off releasing their big titles – with one exception: Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which bombed internationally. Victoria is a large piece of the income pie, particularly for arthouse films where Melbourne alone accounts for roughly half of the national revenue. A national release without Melbourne didn’t make sense in most cases.