Beer and Movies — What 2 Consumer-Reliant Industries Look Like a Year into COVID

It’s been just over a year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020, prompting widespread business closures and public social distancing restrictions. While some countries, like Italy, are seeing another surge of virus infections and once again tightening restrictions, most U.S. states are opening back up.

So, what does this mean for beer and movies?

For “non-essential” industries like film and TV, the closures resulted in long-term delays for many projects, some of which ended up in cancelled as time went on. For example, Netflix cancelled the fourth and final season of GLOW in October 2020, citing increased health risk for its cast and crew because of the required wrestling scenes. According to The Wrap, one episode had already been filmed by the time production was shut down earlier in the year.

Other projects nevertheless adapted. Talk shows took on a virtual format where hosts spoke with their guests via video chat, while some movies and shows limited crew sizes and began mandating COVID testing for everyone involved. Then there’s the case of the TV sitcom, Superstore, which not only began shooting with virus restrictions in place, but actually worked in a prominent COVID narrative throughout its sixth season.

With so many Americans working from home or suffering from unemployment over the past year, streaming services became more important than ever. Though movie theaters continue to struggle from lack of in-person audiences, the entertainment industry as a whole has not been hurting for viewers. After going through numerous release delays, new movies like Wonder Woman 1984, The New Mutants, and Mulan wound up premiering months later through streaming services. Others, like the MCU’s Black Widow, is slotted to premiere simultaneously in theaters and on streaming this summer (over a year after its initial scheduled premiere in May 2020).

The beer industry is a different story. Early projections in spring 2020 from the Brewers Association showed most independent brewers didn’t know if they could make it through the year with restrictions in place. While some breweries did end up shuttering, the mass closures never came. With the food and beverage industry being deemed “essential” in most states following the initial closures, beer sales were able to continue in limited capacities.

Selling beer to-go became key for many, helped largely by states relaxing their laws on alcohol sales. This resulted in brewers canning more beer than ever, but this coincided with Americans stocking up on canned soda and other aluminum-packaged goods for the long periods of time spent at home during the peak “quarantine” era of last summer. The result was an aluminum can shortage, which then proved to be another hurdle for brewers.

Even so, canning beer remains the most viable option for most (some brewers, like Colorado’s Odd13 Brewing and Texas’ 903 Brewers ended up switching to 16 oz. cans in order to cope with the shortage, which has been largely focused on 12 oz. cans). Whether to-go beer will remain possible in the future remains to be seen, but things are looking hopeful. The Texas House recently passed a bill that will allow to-go alcohol sales indefinitely. Meanwhile, aluminum giant Ball Corporation announced a new canning plant to help combat the shortage.

Of course, brewers likely won’t see a return to their past revenues until they can start bringing in more on-premise customers. Indoor dining remains restricted in many states, which continues to be a challenge for breweries once-reliant on taproom draft sales. The vast majority of brewers suffered considerable losses this past year – the Colorado Brewers Guild alone recently reported a 30 to 40 percent revenue loss throughout the pandemic.

As the country moves forward with reopening and more people get vaccinated, revenue streams are likely to improve for consumer-reliant industries like entertainment and beer. But health experts are already referring to the rising cases in Europe as a “cautionary tale for the U.S.” If things move too quickly, the shutdowns will be put back in place.