There may yet be a 2021 movie season

Above : Scarlett Johansson stars in “Black Widow,” which is scheduled to open in theaters May 7. (Photo: Marvel Studios)

What with the move to Phase 2 in some western Washington regions, the movie chain Cinemark has announced that it will reopen four theaters, one each in Bellevue, Federal Way, Tacoma and Olympia.

Each theater will abide by strict protocols involving sanitizing between showtimes, limited capacity and physical distancing and obligatory face-masking (except for “eating and drinking in the auditoriums”).

Since Spokane County is still in Phase 1 , local theaters will remain shuttered. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that, despite past reports, the parent company of Spokane’s downtown movie complex, AMC River Park Square, isn’t headed for bankruptcy – at least not for the moment.

In a story published Jan. 25 by CNN Business, AMC CEO Adam Aaron said that his company “had raised $917 million of new equity and debt capital since mid-December.” Aaron had previously expressed fears that his company might not make it through the winter.

“We raised enough money that our financial runway has been lengthened deep into 2021,” Aaron told CNN Business reporter Frank Pallota. “What that means,” he added, “is that AMC as a company remains viable, that our theaters will be open for our guests.”

And how will that work out in the immediate future?

“We’ve already assumed that moviegoing would be quite light in the first half of 2021,” Aaron said, “but it’s also our assumption that moviegoing will pick up in the second half of 2021. There are a lot of movies that are going to be released this summer, this fall and next winter.”

One film that (at this point) is scheduled to open as early as May 7 is “The Black Widow.” Spokane, then, has three months to get its pandemic response act together.

Question is, can we do it?