Can the neighborhood movie theater be saved?
Part 1: How superhero cinema and the American addiction to choice are destroying a moviegoing institution
Film Features Movie theater
This is the first in a two-part series by The A.V. Club looking at the challenges faced by small, independent movies theaters across the country.
It would be easy to weep for the creeping, possibly inevitable, death of the neighborhood single-screen movie theater, if we weren’t sitting at home pounding down multiple episodes of Ted Lasso or sitting in a multiplex fulfilling our cultural obligation to watch Ant-Man And Captain America: Guardians Of The Legend Of The Endgame In The Multiverse of Madness. But if you take a moment to reflect on the dire standing of the neighborhood bijou—that non-multiplex, American movie house serving a localized community, and imagined by most people to be run as a mom-and-pop enterprise—you may gasp with horror.
Even people who haven’t been to a single-screen theater in decades want them to still be out there somewhere, just like they want the hometowns they left in 2007 to wait for their return, and their moms to keep their childhood bedroom preserved for them. In the picket-fence strewn consciousness of a certain version of America, a weekend matinee at a single-screen movie palace is as iconic as a hot dog in a ballpark, or the Mayberry fishing hole Opie skips rocks on in the credits to The Andy Griffith Show.
Well, you can still get a frankfurter at a Yankees game, and Opie is still playing pranks on Barney Fife on MeTV. But depending on where you live, you might not have access to a one-screen theater anymore. COVID was an existential crisis for theater going. People stayed home. Streaming went from an aspect of home viewing to a preferred option for experiencing theater-worthy content. While the number of U.S. movie screens has held relatively steady since COVID hit at around 40,700, it’s widely believed within the exhibition industry that a shakeout is coming, with the possibility that 25 percent to 40 percent of screens will be shuttered in the next five to eight years.
The demise of single-screen theaters started long ago
Single-screen theaters will surely be among the fallen. Because long before COVID, the single-screen theater was already in free fall. If you go back to the 1980s and chart the trends, you’ll find that while there were half as many movie screens in 1985 as there are today, there were 50 percent more movie houses. That means as multiplex and megaplex theaters expanded their screen count astronomically by becoming limitless buffets of content, the single site concept was falling off a cliff.
“The single-screen theater is as challenged right now as it has ever been in the history of cinema,” says Daniel Loria, Editorial Director of Boxoffice Pro, an exhibition industry journal. “A big reason is the fragmentation of the audience. In the 1950s, you had a monoculture that could create a phenomenon like Elvis. Everyone would listen to the same music, or watch programs one at a time on the same three of four stations on TV. The single screen was suited to that time of consensus—when everyone might want to see the same movie at roughly the same time.”
But the audience broke into fractions starting in the late 1960s. Young and old. Hip and square. Easy Rider and True Grit. Or, to put it in contemporary terms, Yellowstone and The White Lotus. And the multiplex—a term first coined by Sumner Redstone in 1973 to describe a burgeoning trend that took over the moviegoing experience—was more suited than a single screen to a time of chaos that was demanding a chaotic range of choices.
According to Loria, the “blockbuster” tentpoles that took over Hollywood production beginning with Jaws and Star Wars in the late 1970s papered over some of the cracks by using saturation booking techniques and massive national ad buys to generate wide interest in individual titles. But even this benefitted the multiplex over the single screen. “Distribution started looking at tentpoles, and a wide release strategy to conquer as many screens nationally as possible simultaneously,” Loria says. “That’s when the ‘opening weekend’ concept of exhibition comes in, where you have to be everywhere at once. The tentpole model generates great opening weekend grosses accompanied by rapid falloffs that a single-screen theater can’t sustain. So even the movies that work create a stress on the single screen. Distribution is not really set up to help the single screen perform under the contemporary tentpole model.”
Summer blockbusters can’t compete with your couch
Even that imperfect blockbuster model is faltering. The streaming revolution has come, and while there’s been an overall production glut driven by Netflix, the number of movies available to actual theaters has fallen precipitously. “Right now, we’re in an era of fewer movie releases after COVID,” Loria says. “We had 987 films released to theaters in 2019. In 2020 and 2021, that number was under 400 for each of those years. And look at the impact e-commerce has had on the brick and mortar economy. Exhibition isn’t immune to that trend.”
What all this means if you operate a single-screen theater is that you’re in an increasingly desperate no-win contest, with fewer films being competed for by harried bookers. For an upcoming blockbuster like Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny a giant company like Disney can lock in 4,000 auditoriums with a phone call if they stick to the multiplex circuit: over-leveraged multiplex giant AMC Entertainment has 7,768 screens, Regal has 6,853, Cinemark has 4,440 and etc.—the list of exhibition “giants” is long.
Businesses love economies of scale, and they also love similarities of corporate culture. When Disney talks to AMC, it’s one giant talking to another. While that certainly doesn’t mean Disney can’t be an excellent partner for what remains of the one-screen movie palaces, today’s blockbuster must, by its very nature, be seen widely to make money, and therefore has primarily to concern itself not with the Davids of exhibition, but with exhibition’s Goliaths.
Yet while the single-screen theater is “stressed” according to Loria, it’s not dying. People are still running single-screens all over America, and there are trends at work elsewhere in American culture that could possibly lead to a single-screen renaissance.
Part Two (Coming Thursday): Why innovation and imagination are required for single-screen movie theaters to survive.
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The tentpole model generates great opening weekend grosses accompanied by rapid falloffs that a single-screen theater can’t sustain.Equally troublesome for single-screen theaters is the onerous screening requirements forced on them by big studios. In order to get to screen one of their big releases, Disney will require that the theater run the film on the biggest screen available for a minimum of multiple weeks. This isn’t so bad for a multiplex, but for a small town theater it’s financially ruinous. Within the first week, everyone in town has seen the film, and hardly anyone shows up the next weeks. If the theater won’t commit, they don’t get the film for weeks, by which time many locals have made the trip elsewhere to see the latest big thing. But Disney wants huge box office numbers to show to shareholders, so they aren’t about to let off the gas.
I don’t really see anything in this article that implicates “superhero cinema” above and beyond typical blockbusters for the troubles faced by ongoing single-screen theaters. If Marvel’s The Avengers had fizzled instead of succeeded, shuttering the MCU, would neighborhood single-screen houses be in better shape?
Yeah, not the best premise. Can’t blame superhero shit for this, any more than you could similar blockbusters.The problem is that the entire industry needs an overhaul. Even then, though, you’ll have small theaters that run niche programming and manage to keep the lights on. Some manage as nonprofits, such as the Coolidge Corner Theater: https://coolidge.org/.
Love the Coolidge!
Coolidge is great, and Brattle theater.
I loved the Coolidge when I lived in Boston but it’s really not a good argument for the nonprofit model outside of a major metro that can support a fair bit of nonprofit.
Nonprofit model isn’t going to work everywhere, but it’s an idea.I mean, shit, there are still pro abortion nonprofits in the deep South. They just have WAY the fuck more challenges to weather.
Totally fair. I didn’t mean to poo-poo the idea full stop, just point out that the financials are hard to manage. I’ve had a fair bit of experience around arts nonprofits and know how much they struggle.
I think the specific corporate synergistic way that super cinema operates, specifically the MCU, can be implicated. Because the MCU highly encourages engagement with Disney+. So when you have a series of interconnected films that then tell you to run home and watch the interconnected TV shows, it discourages engagement with film narratives outside of that particular world.Now do any other movies *encourage* engagement with movies outside of their worlds? Generally not. But they aren’t actively fighting for all of your attention the way that Disney’s voraciousness does.
Even growing up in the 70’s, I only remember one single screen theater, all the rest were 2 to 4. The single screen had the biggest screen in the city for a long time though. It was gone by the late 80’s.
No. All the single screen theaters I grew up with in the 70’s and 80’s were replaced by multiplexes long before Disney even bought Marvel. You could maybe blame blockbusters, as the article sort of tried to, but not the MCU or superhero movies in general.
Disney, WB, etc demand x amount of weeks from distributors. Considering all the recent Marvel stinkers, being signed onto Ant man for 12 weeks means 12 weeks of little to no revenue. A multiplex can handle keeping it its worst screen because it has other options.The comic book film industry is incredibly punishing to small theaters. Its incredible how little class consciousness there is for for small theater owners who have to go up against the behemoth capitalism of Disney that has little to no care for smaller theaters.
It’s kinda funny how it doesn’t really come up in the article. It’s clearly just a line to get rage-clicks from the front page.
Single screen cinemas are doing pretty good with second run flicks in my area.
I think second run and niche programming are the way to go with smaller single screens.
And renting them out, my friend’s family rented a local theater a couple times over Covid to run kid flicks for the family.
We had a former multi-screen theater get bought out and turned into a second run $3 theater for years. It was great, sometimes they’d get a release while it was still showing in the major local theaters.
We have an old theater that now has two screens, although both are small. Its a non-profit now and they sell concessions for a fraction of what it costs elsewhere plus beer and wine. They do some music acts and small theater, etc, and to do that they removed all the seats in one of the theaters and they have comfy couches and chairs in there that can be moved when they need to. My wife and I saw the Fablesman there on a Saturday matinee in December and it was just a fantastic experience. I wish all these small theaters could do this or that they call could band together Johhny Rose style and make it as a niche.
We have a historic theatre like that, and it’s run as a non-profit organization, so that’s really nice and it feels safer from development that way (though that could be wishful thinking on my part).
creeping, possibly inevitable, death
That’s my favorite Metallica song.
Timely:
wow
I tend to prefer their straight-up covers but this one is fun.
The Rialto here in Raleigh just closed. Can Tarantino just buy all these up and keep them going?
Yep. One of the factors in buying a home in my neighborhood was being able to walk to the Rialto to see a film. Broke my heart when it closed.
Speaking as someone who sat on the board of a single-screen art house for several years, the problems we faced were three-fold. One was that the distributors made demands incompatible with the economics of a single-screen; i.e. the requirement to run a film a minimum number of weeks. A multiplex can shunt an older or underperforming flick to a smaller auditorium; a single-screen has…well…Second, the local multiplexes made deliberate efforts to prevent us from acquiring breakout indie titles—movies with art-house audience-friendly content that had somehow achieved national attention.Third—and this may have been specific to us—we had a rapacious asshole of a landlord who demanded ever-increasing rents and forced us into an agreement that meant he would acquire all of our equipment and assets if we couldn’t make the payments. Long story short: the theater went belly-up in the fall of 2019, then COVID hit. After a couple of years of being unable to attract a buyer, he sold off all of the equipment and seating. And now there’s a big, illuminated marquee downtown pleading for someone to buy an overpriced, empty box with a slanted floor.
Yep.The entire industry needs an overhaul. It’s still lashed to the studio system, FFS.
I could be wrong but I think the landlord assholery you mention is relatively common for movie houses. I’ve heard that from friends in both Boston and Pittsburgh.
“One was that the distributors made demands incompatible with the economics of a single-screen;”This I remember reading something a long time ago about studios demanding theaters upgrade all their projection and sound equipment or not be allowed to screen stuff from their studio, or it may have been a specific movie. We have one or 2 local single screen theaters, neither really show current movies but generally screen recent(ish) stuff or have things like family/kids nights.
I wish your former landlord unending personal and financial misery for the rest of his life.
Me too!
Right, this is about what I expected. I was going to swing into the comments and say that I don’t want to see “blockbusters” at a small indie cinema – I want to see unique things I can’t see elsewhere. Well, I would imagine it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than just “pick better movies”.
NO. Not unless streaming goes away or is severely curtailed. Either do away with it, or make a law saying new film releases can’t be streamed until one year after theatrical release.But even that doesn’t deal with the tv show/episodic releases that entice people to just stay home.TLDR: Shut down the internet altogether.
I think they can be saved but they need to switch models from being just first run theaters. Kevin Smith bought a theater in NJ and is keeping that going between being both first run and a place for him to host event screenings which he said makes more money than the first run movies there.Not saying ever theater has the benefit of being a celebrity run facility, but the Princeton Theater in NJ also does both, and the event/revival screenings usually does better for them than first run, especially when timed around holidays. Their 4K screening of Night of the Living Dead around Halloween was a particular favorite of mine.
Niche programming is a benefit. Especially in communities with underserved subcultures. I have no doubt that the single screen in my parents little podunk town would benefit from some weekly midnight Rocky Horror screenings. The goth and queer kids could use the fun.
Kevin Smith has an 8 digit net worth. He can keep anything afloat if he chooses. I’m not sure if rich guy vanity projects are really good examples here.
Yeah, I said in my second paragraph that not every indie theater has that benefit, but that he also doesn’t make money from first run movies there. He’s stated that the money is from events and from concessions. I mean if more indie theaters offered unique concessions(they don’t have to be Alamo level here), I’d be inclined to visit them more often.
Yeah, he’s said for a while now, including the Fatman Beyond episode last night, that they’re making pretty much all their money from showing old movies rather than the new releases. Although he did mention that both he and his manager were shocked when they had a crowd show up for the Mario Bros movie this weekend. Supposedly he talked with some other small owners and is going to scrap one of the screens to put in a bar to help generate some revenue.
Yeah, I’m hoping JC can open up a Scum and Villany in NJ as well, as he’s alluded to doing in the past. I’m actually not shocked that Mario did well there. The main street where it’s located is frequented by a lot of families. It’s also next door to an ice cream parlor and in the surrounding blocks, by a bunch of restaurants.
My main attraction there is Carton Brewery a few blocks over. It’s a pretty decent main street.
There is an indie theater in my city that works like this, and I think it’s how it manages to survive. (It’s also pretty good proof of concept that this can work even without a celebrity backer). The people at my local theater work hard to carve out this niche. They’ll have 1 or 2 first-run movies playing on the big screen, but the two smaller theaters in the complex play an eclectic collection of indie, art house, and classic movies. And they’ve built a robust calendar of special events: cult movies (Big Liebowski, Spirited Away, Rocky Horror, Dirty Dancing, The Room), documentaries, international films, and events like NT Live and Opera. They’ve also collaborated with the restaurants in the neighborhood on “dinner and a show” programs. The do midnight showings and mini-film festivals based around a theme. They run their own schedule of events alongside the city’s larger film festival. Basically, the folks that run that theater make damn sure that they’ve got something unique to sell to the community. And then they get out there and promote it. But it’s not easy. I have no idea how they survived covid, but I’m glad that they did.
Yeah exactly. The key to indie theater survival is to counter-program first one corporate theaters. It’s how the Mahoning Drive-In operates and is making a killing as a result. Check out the documentary At The Drive-In, for their story. I totally think that not only could indie theaters survive by turning into revival/event theaters, but they’ll be pretty successful.
I’ve always thought this was the way forward for small indie theaters. I used to teach at a big state school in a very rural area. Basically, whenever the students return, the town doubles in size. And in the middle of the downtown area, just south of campus, is a shuttered old theater. It has amazing art deco style and the original marquee is still there. But it closed about two years before I moved there, and it was still closed when I moved out seven years later. I always thought that was a real missed opportunity. You have 40,000 students, most of whom are within walking distance of your theater, in town for 9 months out of the year. You could do a ton of programming that would appeal to college kids. Anime film festivals. 80s and 90s marathons. Cult classics. Midnight screenings. Pre-party screenings. Collaborations with the university on film series. The possibilities go on and on.They could have done so well. It was a town gasping for things to do. With the right model, people would have come out to support it. I always said that if I won the lottery, I was going to buy and revive that theater. I just checked and apparently it was bought in late 2021, and the new owners said they were going to revive the theater, which had three screens in its previous incarnation, and turn it into a single stage performance venue. To me, this is a mistake. It takes way more money and work to bring in enough live acts to keep a place like that afloat in that backwoods town. You’re not drawing national acts there consistently, I’m sorry. You’re just not. Keeping it as a theater with three screens could have been a much better choice, and it could have had daily opportunities to make money rather than sporadic events.But of course that was 18 months ago, and my friends who are still in town report that the theater still lies untouched, so methinks the realities of that venture might have become apparent to the new owners.
the new owners said they were going to revive the theater, which had three screens in its previous incarnation, and turn it into a single stage performance venue. To me, this is a mistake. I agree completely—when we moved from NYC there was a single-screen movie theater that showed art, indie and foreign films. But it closed down a year after my ex-wife decided she wanted to buy the house we were renting, and turned into a live stage venue. It was what VARIETY calls a “nabe”, a couple hundred old theater seats at most and a small venue overall. What kinds of acts are they going to book there? Even regional acts have bigger audiences than that theater can manage, so they get what looks like a lot of local bands…which is probably just as well, given there’s no place convenient to park a tour bus either!
American addiction to choiceAre you trolling? Yes, I am addicted to not paying $20 per person to see a movie.
I liked the “subscription service” model that was rolled out shortly before the pandemic (presumably inspired by the semi-scam that was Moviepass). AMC and Regal had them, and presumably still do, although the theaters near me didn’t survive the pandemic. For a cost not that much more than a single ticket per month you could see unlimited movies (with additional charges for 3D and iMAX showings). It was worth it to me for the time before the pandemic and the theater closings made it not.
Yeah, I don’t feel like “50s monoculture” is something we should be weeping for.
It’s all about the experience. A lot of neighborhood theaters I’ve encountered frankly are shitty. Run down, poor projection, bog standard concessions. It’s not worth the price being paid, when one could get a far superior experience across the board watching at home. They just seem to have this entitled notion that the aura of moviegoing is inherently superior and therefore the business must be protected. But they’ve forgotten about the experience part.Contrast that with another neighborhood theater in my city, that has leaned heavily into the experience part. They have regular seating, but also couches and loveseats for couples who want to snuggle as they watch the show. They do a range of programming, from new releases to classics. They offer a range of concessions including beer on tap. They have arcade games. IN their latest offering, they’ve converted the basement into a video rental store where you can get VHS and DVDs which has proven to be a big hit with the nostalgia crowd. They understand what the theater is supposed to be, a whole experience.
That’s all valid but if one of the big problems of single screen theaters is that they can’t support themselves financially, how on earth do you expect them to modify into this “experience”?
It requires investment, which means building a business plan to cover the up-front costs, and working with banks and other financiers to fund it. Not everyone has the drive, or the ability to sell the plan.
Yep. And not every market can support such an experience, particularly in the markets where these single screen theaters are located. I mentioned this in response to another response regarding a nonprofit art theater in Boston. Metro areas, even small ones like smaller cities (as a New Yorker I think of Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, etc.), can sometimes support that kind of niche theater experience. But small towns? Without subsidies from local governments to help launch them it’s a hard ask to get off the ground and once launched there has to be a community to support them. The small town where I currently live has a single screen theater that was run for a number of years by a local healthcare org. It was a decent job experience for their special needs clients. But the overhead was too much so it shuttered. People in the town loved having the old theater and they appreciated the benefits it gave to the special needs folks but unless every person who lived in town went to the movies every weekend there was no way it was gonna stay afloat. And that is likely the story for every small town single screen.
I don’t really understand the point of this. Yes, small businesses like this have been endangered for decades now. Big corporations have taken over. It’s not just movie theaters. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, and I don’t see the need to “research it” as if it’s some baffling phenomenon we need an answer to. Small and one-theater movie houses can’t compete with the multiplexes, and people are more used to going farther for things. It’s no problem to drive 20-30 minutes to the nice theaters.And what do superheroes have to do with anything? They aren’t to blame. People have better options at home for most things now, so they only go to theaters to see the big movies that benefit from the huge screen and sound. With or without superhero movies, that would still be the case.
TLDR: Things change. The horse and buggy gives way to the automobile.
In my little town, the single-screen theater is doing OK, because it runs art-house stuff, the occasional classic movie, and, since it also has a stage, a fair amount of live concerts/plays, etc. The six screen multiplex, on the other hand, after struggling for the last several years, just closed down. Of course there’ll always be blockbusters that people want to see in the theater, but for the most part people watch movies at home now, so a small number of theaters can probably handle the demand. I don’t think it’s just single-screen theaters that are in trouble. The choice, I guess, is either to just outlast the other ones in your area and be the only game in town or find your own unique niche, which will usually be the best option for these old classic venues.
I don’t know the business side here, but the model I’ve seen be successful is the member-based, non-profit approach where the institution becomes something closer to a cinema-based community center. It seems like merging with other businesses/business models can help as well. There’s the Hollywood Theater in Portland OR that was purchased by a non-profit in the late 90s and traded on community interest in restoration of a decaying landmark. I worked there in its final days as a gorgeous cheapo second run joint with plaster and wood paneling covering art deco paint from the 20s. Like literally, I went on vacation for a few days and when I got back, the theater had closed. Years later it was able to purchase Movie Madness, Portland’s local crazy-stocked movie archive video store, thereby saving it as well. These places don’t market to the general moviegoing public, they market to communities that value them as unique institutions and there’s never a sense their existence is a thing to take for granted. Same deal with Scarecrow Video in Seattle (not a theater, just another movie-oriented business that survived by becoming a particular kind of non-profit). Not being all like, “Hey! Have you tried this?!” to struggling businesses, just commenting that sort of thing is cool when it can happen.
The historic Eagle Theatre (which opened under the name of the Yosemite Theatre in 1929) in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles is currently undergoing state-of-the-art renovation by the Vidiots Foundation, opening (we hope!) by the summer. Adding insult to injury the space was operated by some freaky-deaky evangelical church for years (with a giant lit sign where the marquee used to be that said STOP SUFFERING, which Vidiots now uses as a hashtag on their social media to herald the opening of the theatre). It’ll be a repertory program, with 250 seats plus 16mm, 35mm, and digital projection. Vidiots will also reopen their video rental store in the building, with 50,000 titles from around the world, including experimental and rare films. Follow them @vidiots on Instagram. It’s going to be so beautiful I almost cry at every update they post.
I’m always fascinated by how the business works around the country.In my city, we’ve got a fuckload of multiplex cinemas which, with about one exception, are all owned by the same company. We’ve got one proper indie cinema which mostly shows UK stuff (which is really great and has the best popcorn for my money) and a Dendy which does a bit of both.
There are (or were, pre-Covid) neighborhood theaters—my ex-wife and I saw The Force Awakens in one. They switched to digital projectors and the tickets were $2.50 each, and they had popcorn, soda, hot dogs and a lot of homemade concessions like cookies and marshmallow treats.
For the record, Oakland’s glorious Grand Lake Theatre is currently open full-time. That pic at the top of this article is from the 2020 quarantine.
lol this is cute? Are you talking hypothetical because the neigbourhood cinema in my town permanently closed their doors a full ass year ago due to loss of profit from lockdown. I have to drive over an hour to the cinema now outta town. What cushy city do you live in where you think this hasn’t already happened yet and they can still be saved? This article made sense like….. maybe two years ago? Big city folks take a glance over at rural communities for even two seconds I promise you your eyes will be opened.
I assume rural communities often involve driving long ways to get to anything.Suburbs do have movie theaters too.
We have a single-screen in our next-door town. It’s right downtown and seems to do really well. The tickets are exorbitant, and even the snacks are cheap. I think they stay afloat by doing not just current releases, but nostalgia films and special family showings, plus it’s a really nice old theater so they do other non-film events there as well, like concerts and charity events.Then in the large city next to the next-door town, in addition to all the multiplexes there’s a historic twin theater that does all the indie stuff.