As David Dayen mentioned in Unsanitized today, Regal Cinemas—the nation’s second-largest chain of movie theaters—announced that it would close its theaters yet again, having reopened them in August. Turns out people aren’t flocking to movies yet. The decision will idle 40,000 of the chain’s employees in the U.S., and another 5,000 in the U.K.

Theater owners put the blame for the shutdown on the studios. "If the studios continue postponing all their releases," John Fithian, chief executive of the National Association of Theatre Owners, told The New York Times, "the movie theaters aren’t going to be there for those postponed releases."

For their part, however, the studios have noticed that people aren’t exactly rushing to the theaters when they do release their pictures, and aren’t likely to until the country has been vaccinated against COVID-19.

What we have is a classic chicken-or-egg—or more precisely, no-chicken-no-egg—dilemma. Americans aren’t likely to patronize indoor venues—and not just movie theaters—until they’re convinced it’s safe. Which is why restaurants now offering outdoor dining aren’t looking forward to winter.

Some movies, of course, have such limited appeal that their release comes complete with the social distancing built in. With this, I have some personal experience. In 1972, director Joseph Losey’s film The Assassination of Trotsky (filmed in the U.K., to which the blacklisted Losey had relocated during the Red Scare), starring Richard Burton as the exiled Scourge of Stalin, was released. As both a socialist and auteurist, I was clearly the targeted audience, and hastened to the vast, opulent Bruin Theatre in Los Angeles’ Westwood Village, to see the picture during, I think, the second day of its run. (The Bruin still stands; in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the Sharon Tate character visits it to see herself on the screen in a Dean Martin picture.)

The Assassination of Trotsky turned out to have measurably less box office appeal than the Dean Martin flick. During the matinee that I attended, I was literally the only person in the theater, which must have easily seated about 800. In that sense, my presence—or actually, the absence of everybody else—both reflected the limited appeal that Trotsky’s Fourth International had had, and looked forward to the imperatives of social distancing in a time of pandemic. Trotsky deserved better then; we deserve better now.