Would you Uber Eats a movie popcorn?

Oh Hoyts, bless their little hearts.

That sounds incredibly condescending, but I swear I don't mean it that way.

What I mean is, it's sweet and quaint and so doggedly optimistic that they are trying to make up some of their massive financial losses during the pandemic by getting us to order movie theater popcorn to our houses.

I really hope some people are doing it.

Now, I'm not saying there's no market at all for this sort of thing. There could be. We all know that there is some kind of magic crack they sprinkle on popcorn made at the movies that makes it taste better than anything you can make at your house. In fact, when some company tries to convince us that they've cracked the code and brought the best-tasting popcorn possible to the supermarket shelves, they advertise it as popcorn that tastes like movie theater popcorn.

But we shouldn't forget that one of the key charms of movie theater popcorn is its warmth. While Uber Eats may be able to keep your pizza or your Chinese food or your Big Mac warm on the trip from the place of its origin to your house, I don't know that the same is really possible with popcorn. By starting at a lower temperature to begin with, you're inevitably going to lose almost all of its warmth, if not all of it, by the time you deliver it to the person who ordered it.

Maybe warmth is not even the goal. While this whole enterprise is designed not only for Hoyts to turn a buck while it can't make money on movies, but also to give some of their employees a paying job, I can't imagine that they have somebody sitting there making popcorn all the time on the off chance somebody orders it. Even in times of desperation, and maybe especially then, businesses have to be run with a common sense approach.

What touches me about this email is that I know how much Hoyts is struggling, behind its desperate effort to insert a breezy attitude. Here's a sample:

"Has this cold weather got you craving your candy bar favorites from Hoyts? We got you!"

There's enthusiasm in that text, but I know there's also pain behind it.

I've been too worried to even check in on any of the theater chains around here, to see the signs plastered to their windows about their temporary closure. I've been too scared to google any news about them to see if any have already said they're going under. Even as things start to open up around here a bit -- my younger son goes back to school on Tuesday -- I understand theaters will be one of the last things to follow suit, probably not until July. And even then, who knows how they will do until they can get a steady diet of new releases coming from the U.S.

And even then, who knows if this virus will be the final nail in the coffin for an industry that was already losing viewers to streaming and the many platforms that provide it.

Hoyts is not even a chain I frequent anymore, this email notwithstanding. A couple years ago they stopped accepting our critics cards, which is something they'd clearly been wanting to do long before then, as they had only accepted the card on weekday afternoons and Monday and Wednesday nights even before dropping their participation altogether.

But I do have this rewards membership from a time I had to buy tickets for my kids to see a movie there, combining it with a day at the shopping center that also included a trip to Pancake Parlour. And I do wish them well, as a purveyor of the thing I love most.

We all know AMC is in trouble in the U.S., as rumors of a bankruptcy filing float around. I have to imagine it could only be worse with smaller chains, though I suppose the economies of scale may favor them instead. Probably a lot has to do with how effectively they were running their business before all this.

Alas, I don't think I could save Hoyts even if I did Uber Eats a movie popcorn from them.

Let's just hope the return of movies, and the return of audiences, can do it instead.