The collapse of Cineworld’s recommended takeover of Cineplex was greeted with a sigh of relief by the British company’s shareholders (Dominic Walsh writes). Strategically, buying Canada’s biggest cinema chain may have been an excellent deal, but loading an already stretched balance sheet with another couple of billion dollars of borrowings in the middle of a pandemic — and with zero revenues coming in — never looked like a great idea.
When Cineworld’s brief statement came out on Friday night, it felt like the words of a company that had been looking for a way out of the C$2.8 billion (£1.6 billion) transaction for weeks and finally had come up with an excuse.
Neither side is saying too much about the reasons: Cineworld blamed “a
