Vue cinemas eyes float or sale in 2022, predicts James Bond-led bounceback from Covid in coming months

Cinemas giant Vue is mulling a potential stock market flotation or sale to private equity in 2022 after a year of rebuilding from the Covid lockdown, its chief executive said today.

Founder Tim Richards predicted bumper Box Office takings in 2021 thanks to the mass of big movie releases that have been held back due to the closure of cinemas during the pandemic.

After the market had fully recovered, he predicted, there would be renewed appetite among investors for well-capitalised theatre chains like Vue, which has been owned by Canadian pension funds Omers and Aimco for the past seven years.

It has been sold four times to various private equity owners since Richards founded it 20 years ago.

Richards said: “I can see another round of private equity or even a listing, not this year, but next year?”

Richards also predicted a flurry of takeovers ahead as weaker chains are forced to sell off parts or all of their businesses although he ruled out Vue as a potential buyer for at least six months.

He built up Vue to its current size of 230 cinemas in nine countries through multiple acquisitions.

“M&A is in our DNA,” he told the Standard: “But this next six to 12 months will be exclusively focused on the company, not M&A activity.”

Vue went into the crisis with trading at record levels before takings fell to zero for the lockdown months. “We were literally on fire going into this thing,” he said.

The fightback will be rapid, however, he predicted, with attendances back up to 90% of pre-covid levels by January with big new releases in the coming months such as the final Daniel Craig James Bond movie, Marvel’s Black Widow with Scarlett Johansson and Wonder Woman 1984.

Richards, a former Warner Brothers executive, praised movie studios for cooperating with cinema chains through Covid and holding back nearly all their launches. But he said they should now relax the normal trend of launching their new releases simultaneously across the world.

While simultaneous releases make for a bigger Box Office bang for the marketing buck and prevent piracy, covid shutdowns in some markets but not others meant they were no longer practical.

He said he understood Disney’s decision to launch its movies Trolls and Mulan on its Disney Plus channel rather than in cinemas because it was proving difficult to find a release date in the packed forthcoming schedule. “They had no choice. Anybody would have done the same thing,” he said.

Overall takings would fall on those films, however, as movies need cinema releases to get the “bump” that translates into bigger streaming and terrestrial TV sales, he said.