Liam O’Dell: Cineworld may go bankrupt, but I won’t miss them

I make no apologies for reaching for the popcorn after hearing that Cineworld could well be going bankrupt. As a key business in an institutionally audist UK cinema industry, one which has an absolutely dire offering for deaf film lovers, I’m very much tempted to say good riddance.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the company is expected to file for bankruptcy in the US, and is considering filing for an insolvency proceeding here in the UK. The Guardian reports that the business has racked up a $4.8 billion debt after facing a hit from the coronavirus pandemic, which suggests their involvement in a one-week-only increase in subtitled screenings earlier this year didn’t exactly win over the Deaf community.

This is the financial cost of UK cinemas believing their own myths about subtitles: they decide against putting on more accessible screenings because few people turn up, because their websites are inaccessible, their promotion is lacking and the small number of showings are on at inappropriate times. They claim hearing people find subtitles distracting, when so many of them have gotten used to captions on social media videos.

We can only speculate on how much revenue an increase in subtitled screenings would bring to UK cinemas, and would have brought to Cineworld, if indeed it is about to go under. What we do have a better understanding of, though, is the power of the purple pound – that is, the spending power of disabled people.

According to statistics from Purple, the spending power of disabled people and their households is around £274 billion per year to UK businesses. Of course, not all of that significant sum of money comes from deaf people going to see the latest Marvel superhero movie, but when you consider the often cited statistic that 11 million people in the UK are deaf or hard of hearing, it’s easy to see just how big that potential revenue stream could be to cinema chains such as Cineworld, ODEON and Vue.

Rip Cineworld you would have loved subtitled screenings improving your revenue xo https://t.co/f5N5L35Xfj

— Liam O'Dell (@LiamODellUK) August 19, 2022

There’s also other people who benefit from subtitles too, such as autistic and other neurodivergent people, those with auditory processing disorder and those for whom English isn’t their first language. Deaf people are the first people who spring to mind for many hearing people (and cinemas) when it comes to captioning, but these groups shouldn’t be ignored either. In fact, I’d be comfortable saying at this point that there are more people out there in society who are fine with subtitles than those who see it as an issue.

And for those who do, they have countless other showings to enjoy. We simply do not have that option yet, in 2022.

The remaining big businesses like ODEON and Vue won’t see Cineworld’s possible demise as a wake-up call around the poor access they provide to deaf and hard of hearing customers, but they should. Many companies, industry commentators and more will likely blame it on the convenient catch-all of the pandemic which screwed every one of us over in some way, shape or form – it’s certainly what’s being cited by news outlets as they report on reasons for the company’s potential bankruptcy.

Yet the figures don’t seem to paint such a picture. Data firm Comscore gave the total box office revenue for UK and Irish cinemas in 2021 as £556.8 million, compared to just £296,768,441 the year before. Earlier this month, the current total for this year stood at £562.6 million, and 2022 isn’t even over yet.

Objectively, ticket sales (and thus, customer numbers) are doing well, but they could be doing better, and the industry is – bafflingly – reluctant to help itself.

The Royal National Institute for Deaf people (RNID) pulled out of the UK Cinema Association’s (UKCA) cinema subtitling project in May due to “little progress” over the last three years. Just a few weeks later, it cut ties with the UKCA completely as a result of “shallow and tokenistic” work on subtitled cinema.

The UK cinema industry will no doubt mourn the loss of Cineworld and call for more government support for hospitality, but they’ll likely do what they’ve always done, and fail to recognise that they must take action themselves. Now is the time to increase subtitled screenings in the long-term, put them on at accessible times, and promote them well.

The alternative is to continue discriminating against deaf and disabled people, until another cinema chain risks going under, and we’ll be standing here once again telling them we told you so.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is an award-winning Deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.