Under the SCREEN fund to tide cinemas over in the coronavirus crisis, the Limelight in Tuggeranong and Dendy in the Canberra Centre will both get $85,000. The Palace Electric will get $60,000.

SCREEN stands for Supporting Cinemas' Retention Endurance and Enhancement of Neighbourhoods.

"We are enormously grateful," Ross Entwistle, chief executive of Limelight Cinemas said. "It's a lifeline in what's been a very difficult 18 months."

The chief executive of Electric Cinemas, Ben Zeccola, said the grant made "an enormous difference".

Cinemas in the ACT were closed from March last year to July as the lockdown took hold. Even when they've been open in recent months, capacity has been restricted.

On top of that, the flow of films from Hollywood and Europe has slowed to a trickle. Studios were in lockdown so no new films emerged for much of the pandemic.

The big James Bond film No Time to Die was postponed and then postponed again.

The film which is the 25th installment in the Bond franchise and marks Daniel Craig's final appearance as agent 007 was first due in April last year. It's now due to come out on October 8 this year.

Limelight Cinema's director of operations at Tuggeranong, Michael Singh, said that other big money pictures had been pushed back. The new Top Gun was expected in the middle of this year but was now expected - hoped for - towards the end of this year.

The Marvel franchise had also suffered. "It's been a bit of a struggle," Mr Singh said. "We haven't had the constant stream of releases."

Limelight chief Ross Entwistle said that film making was starting to get back up to speed. "As the UK and US emerge, the situation is improving. By August and September, we are hopeful of a more normalised release schedule," he said.

Canberra's cinemas have suffered in other ways, too. The Palace Electric is at the bottom of the Nishi building which contains apartments, offices and an hotel. People would use the cinema as a cafe and a bar even when they didn't go to a film, so closure ended that trade.

The money for the Canberra cinemas is part of an $8.7 million hand-out to independent cinemas across Australia. The federal government said it was the first tranche of the $20 million fund.

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"Independent cinemas are so important to the social and cultural health of our communities in Australia," the Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts, Paul Fletcher, said.

"Through this fund we are already enabling 158 cinemas to keep operating and to provide a popular, low-cost and Covid-safe way for people to go out and enjoy a movie."

Fund administrator Screen Australia said that the aim was to offer "one-off business continuity grants" for cinemas which had "experienced significant declines in revenue due to the Covid-19 pandemic".

Screen Australia's chief executive Graeme Mason said: "We are pleased that in the three months since we opened applications in April, more than $8.7 million has already been allocated."

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