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Don’t expect moviegoers in Louisiana’s Gulf Coast to head to Sam Raimi’s Category 5 hurricane/alligator movie Crawl this weekend, or any title for that matter. With Tropical Storm Barry expected to dump 25 inches of rain after it reaches landfall Saturday as a Category 1 hurricane, AMC is shutting down all New Orleans and Baton Rouge locations at 6 p.m. local time tonight, and they’ll stay closed through Saturday.
Parts of New Orleans already are underwater with the Mississippi River, which is usually at 6 to 8 feet in midsummer, now at 16 feet. Barry is poised to push the river’s level to 19 feet — a measure not seen since February 1950, per CNN and the Weather Channel.
Flash flood watches are in effect for parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the western Florida Panhandle.
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell is asking New Orleans residents to take shelter beginning at 8 p.m.
States of emergency have been declared in the Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, Plaquemines and St. Charles parishes, with mandatory evacuations ordered in Jefferson and Plaquesmine parishes. New Orleans has a system of pumps that go into effect in flooding situations, but they’ll only remove an inch of rainwater in the first hour of the storm, CNN reports.
In regards to the box office, distributors aren’t expected a major fallout from Barry with that portion of the Gulf Coast region generating less than 1% of the weekend’s ticket sales.