“Making really good decisions on your last two or three screens sometimes swings a needle between $1,000 or even $10,000 on a weekend,” says Rich Daughtridge, ICA president and president of Maryland-based Warehouse Cinemas, which opened the doors on both of its locations within the past two turbulent years. Among its 2022 goals: working with distributors to establish more wiggle room for releasing flops.
Shut in movie times windows#
“When you have the longer windows, you get locked up for screens’ number of days or weeks, and the shortened windows allow for us to play these movies, but also have screens and sessions available for alternative content,” reasons Alamo CEO Shelli Taylor.įlexible screening guidelines have been a key focus for the Independent Cinema Alliance, a trade group advocating for its members’ combined 3,000 screens. The company is unique within the landscape in actually viewing the trend toward shortened windows as beneficial, due to the strict requirements distributors can impose on films still in regular release. Alamo - which emerged from Chapter 11 in June, three months after the filing - is now feeling bullish in February, it announced that seven new theaters are on the way, featuring the premium food and drink offerings and repertory film screenings that are core to the brand. “We lost that argument.”Įxhibitors have done their best to find positives during the turmoil. “I argued, ‘You’re really going to tell me that we can’t show this here because you want to give it to a national chain?’” she recalls. Cohen cites an example from late last year, when R/C was denied early-access shows for Sing 2 because she was told that a bigger name across town needed a fair share. “We at least tripled, maybe even quadrupled, our followers, just because we became so much more active on social media.”Īdding to the challenges, mini chains continue to feel that the playing field with the deeper-pocketed competitors isn’t always level. “More than anything, we realized that we have to market ourselves better and not depend so much upon the studios,” says Cinelux CEO Paul Gunsky, whose company operates seven locations in Northern California.
Other pandemic-era pivots for smaller chains have responded to the need to skew younger and more commercial as older filmgoers are more reluctant to return to theaters, and have involved investing in digital marketing to reach at-home audiences, reducing screenings amid staffing shortages and offering more alternative programming, such as live UFC fights, to compensate for fewer film options. So are we going to price a brand-new movie at $5? That just doesn’t seem to make sense.” “Then the day-and-date titles started to make up a lot more of what we were able to play. “We said, ‘It’s available at home - we’re not going to charge a full-price ticket,’” says R/C film booker Samantha Cohen. Although East Coast-based R/C Theatres declined to screen Bill & Ted Face the Music when it was released day-and-date on premium video-on-demand in August 2020, the chain has since relented and now screens home-available titles, but no longer at reduced prices. Reps for multiple chains have acknowledged the need to discard a previous policy of shunning a film that’s already available in the home.
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