I don't think they hate me quite that much.
We've got a Coyote and Road Runner thing going on.
I am not expert but from what little I do know cinemas HATE double bills. Ever wondered why double and triple bills for trilogies and duologies are rare? They are harder to fill as being sat down for 4-6 hours is a tough sell then factoring in adverts (and intermission if they do one) then cleanup the theatre has lost 5-7 hours of a room for a lower attendance. This can be offset with an increase in concession sales, sure, but effectively a double bill needs to make twice the money to be worthwhile for the cinema.
My guess, and it is purely a guess, is few theatres wanted to take the showing because they'd much rather use that space for films that would sell better and do better (like Spiderman). Which is another factor, Gundam pulls an adult audience which buys less concessions and because Spiderman and the Odyssey did so well theatres actually had too little capacity to 'waste' on a niche product.
I suspect, and it is purely a guess, AtA simply couldn't get cinemas to take it, and when they finally could (just one chain Odeon) they had only one showing.
They probably didn't want to publicise such a limited run to such a wide audience. A little of a chicken and egg situation because if they publicised perhaps other cinemas would want to take it.
Meanwhile Ghibli films, even lesser known ones, sell and sell well. I saw Kikki in the cinema only because the first weekend was completely sold out (every showing) so the cinema put on more dates.
AtA will probably never confirm this because they don't want to hurt business partners, it's a bad look, but considering Angel's Egg got so many showings and AtA publicised it I just think it's unfortunate business realities. And they don't want to throw Odeon, Vue, etc under the bus because of how hard a time UK Cinemas have been having and how down the line AtA will want good relationships with these cinemas for other films.
And I will say this compared to a decade ago it feels like Cinemas are showing more anime. A decade ago I'd be lucky to get 2 anime in my cinema per year, now there's 1 a month, sometimes 2, and a lot of them are AtA distributed films While I want more to come, even classic shows edited for cinema, I also don't want an Atari situation whereby to fill the cinemas with anime they reduce the quality.
