Nolte: Movie Theaters Surrender to Science, Lift Mask Mandates

Kids from the Carmelo Anthony Foundation come together to celebrate the "Diary of a W
Charles Sykes/Invision for Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment/AP Images

America’s movie theater chains were staring down the throat of another grim Memorial Day weekend — which is supposed to be the start of the lucrative summer season — and blinked.

“Movie theater chains, including AMC, Regal and Cinemark, will no longer require fully vaccinated guests to wear face masks,” reports the far-left Variety.

Well, what other choice did they have? None. Just like the Biden administrations and the highly-politicized and disgraced CDC had no choice but to lift the fascist mask mandates two weeks ago after a gusher of bad economic news (that’s still gushing) hit the public.

It’s very simple… Texas and Florida appear to be proving mask mandates are unnecessary. On top of that, it is ridiculously un-American to keep people in masks against their will. It’s like the government doing something as ridiculous as mandating condom usage in the age of AIDS.

Worse still, the mask mandates signaled (falsely) to the public that the vaccine wasn’t all that effective. If the vaccine is so weak the vaccinated still need a mask, why get vaccinated?

So, finally, the Biden White House and the CDC were forced to cave to reality and now movie theaters have done the same, and did so just in time… With two big movies in wide release — Cruella and A Quiet Place Part II — on this crucial weekend, an anti-science mask mandate would have kept a lot of customers away (including me), but also scared people into believing movie theaters were not safe.

This would have been a disastrous decision, and that’s why the abrupt turnaround.

Naturally, people who are not vaccinated are still required to wear masks, but no one is checking your vaccine status at the door, so that’s kind of a silly rule. My guess is that anyone who hasn’t yet been vaccinated is choosing not to because they don’t believe the virus will hit them too hard or the vaccine is unsafe. Hard to imagine people like that wearing masks when they don’t really have to.

What I saw while enjoying my Thursday night double feature of A Quiet Place Part II and Nobody (those reviews are here and here), my first return to the movies in over a year, was that the people still masking up — and this was by a large margin, were young people — college-aged and younger, even though they are all likely vaccinated and therefore have less to fear than middle-aged folks like myself who threw away our masks.

More virtueless virtue-signaling from The Dumbest and Most Spoiled Generation.

Regardless, the revocation of the movie theater mask mandate appears to have helped make A Quiet Place Part II a box office hit, which means the movies really are back.

My guess is that had the mandate not been revoked, this weekend’s box office take would have been a lot lower.  There’s no way in hell I’d sit through a two-hour movie in a mask, and I doubt I’m alone.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

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