US unemployment rate

That China's box office and American unemployment should be holding hands is not the sentence economists were hoping to write about 2020, but it is the sentence the data delivered. Cinema and joblessness, twinned. A pandemic does that.

Both moved dramatically in 2020 for direct covid reasons. Chinese box office revenue collapsed as theatres closed across the country during the earliest and strictest lockdowns, while US unemployment spiked above 14% in April 2020 as American businesses shut overnight. The correlation isn't causal — it's the same virus hitting two very different economies in the same quarter.

So the correlation is one country losing its cinema and another losing its jobs, at the same moment, for the same reason. Different losses. Same virus.