Arri to Close Two Facilities Amid Rapidly Changing Cinema Landscape
Amid Arri’s ongoing financial challenges and the difficult professional cinema landscape, the German company announced this week that it will cut jobs and close two locations primarily focused on producing lighting equipment.
As Bloomberg reports, Arri Group’s cuts are the result of a broader decline in the cinema industry and movie production, the same reason why Arri began considering a sale earlier this year.
When reports surfaced in August that Arri was contemplating a sale, news also broke that Arri was working with the consultancy AlixPartners to “streamline its business.” It’s easy to connect the dots between these efforts and Arri’s new decision to close lighting factory, repair, and distribution operations in Stephanskirchen and Brannenburg in Germany.
Bloomberg reports that these lighting centers will close by the end of the year, which will result in 150 people losing their current jobs. However, Arri says that around one-third of these people will be offered positions at Arri’s Munich headquarters.
“Like many companies in the film industry, Arri is undergoing a significant transformation to address lasting shifts in market demand while reinforcing its core strengths,” Arri spokesperson Kevin Schwutke told Bloomberg over email.
Arri was founded back in 1917 and has long been a mainstay in the cinema industry. The company’s lights, which have been undercut in recent years by cheaper alternatives, primarily from Chinese companies, were, for a while, a ubiquitous sight on professional film sets.
There is also the broader trend across the imaging landscape, not just cinematic lighting products, that affordable prosumer-oriented products are replacing costly professional ones.
As cinematographer Zakaree Sandberg writes on Reddit, “The ‘high end’ is just no longer viable. There are cheaper versions of everything that get you 95% of the way there.”
Although Arri appears to be bowing out of the lighting industry, the company’s high-end cinema cameras remain fully in production, including the new Arri Alexa 35 Xtreme camera announced in July for $55,000. Arri also recently announced Film Lab, a new post-production tool designed to give digital videos a more analog look and feel.
Image credits: Arri
