Here are the Covid-19 precautions to take if you want to go to the movie theater.
For basically all of Hollywood’s existence, relatively few Hollywood films have featured strong and prominent Asian American characters. So, what would be the best time to finally debut a superhero movie, Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, that actually has an Asian American (or rather an Asian Canadian) male lead? Gee, how about in the middle of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic when cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are surging? Of course, this is not to suggest that any of Shang-Chi’s producers said, “hey, let’s wait until a pandemic to release a film with an Asian American male lead character to see how it does at the box office. And when it flops, we’ll say ‘sorry, no more films like that.’” That would be throwing yet another conspiracy theory onto the slop pile of Covid-19 conspiracy theories that’s been drowning America. Nevertheless, the timing of the opening of Shang-Chi is quite ironic given what’s happened to Asian Americans prior to and throughout this pandemic. The timing hasn’t stopped the movie from registering the biggest Labor Day weekend movie debut since 2007, though. So far, the movie has raked in at least $71.4 million in the U.S. alone, as Good Morning America reported here: Imagine what could have happened had the movie opened in any other year, with the possible exception of the floating dumpster fire year that was 2020. The movie opened in theaters nationwide this weekend as Covid-19 coronavirus cases continued to surge throughout the country. According to the New York Times, the seven-day moving average of new reported Covid-19 cases each day was 161,327 yesterday. That’s over 14 times the 11,133 tally on June 20. For the first time since March, the average Covid-19 deaths per day in U.S. have pushed over the 1,500 mark. The news is now replete with stories of hospitals and intensive care units (ICUs) being overwhelmed. Things are not going well with the pandemic. At the same time, a lot seems to be riding on how well Shang-Chi does in the theaters. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, otherwise known as the MCU in case you don’t want to say “arvel”, “inematic”, and “niverse”, has been a very successful franchise. After releasing the movie Iron Man in 2008, Marvel Studios soon realized that they had a virtual gold mine at their hands. They could quickly leverage many existing characters and stories from decades of comic books into live action films. A slew of films followed, but, not surprisingly, roles for Asian Americans did not. Heck a tree played a major superhero role well before an Asian American did.
