Movie Theaters

[BluBonnet]

Why the Cinerama Dome Is Still Closed 5 Years After the Pandemic

Off the corner of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood, a movie theater that was once the film industry’s favorite gathering spot remains in a state of limbo.

The Cinerama Dome opened in 1963 and later became a popular spot for cinephiles under the ownership of Arclight Cinemas, but it has remained boarded up since the pandemic, a period that drove Arclight out of business and forced it to sell nearly all of its former cineplexes to new owners. All that remains is the Cinerama Dome and its adjacent multiplex, which Arclight’s parent company, Decurion, previously teased would eventually reopen.

But those reopening plans were pushed back to 2024 … then to 2025. And this past spring, a grassroots fan group called Save Arclight claimed that a planned $20 million renovation of the historic theater had been quietly canceled. While recent developments of the complex surrounding the Dome have kept hopes alive that Decurion might try again in the future, multiple theater and studio insiders told TheWrap that they doubt the Cinerama Dome will reopen anytime soon, citing the exorbitant costs and increasingly challenging market that the Dome faces.

It’s a grim and uncertain fate for a Los Angeles treasure that had experienced a 21st century rebirth as a gathering for film enthusiasts. It’s also a microcosm of a movie theater industry diminished by economic and cultural headwinds such as rising costs and the wider availability of streaming content.

Hollywood, meanwhile, has moved on. The industry screenings and premieres the Dome once hosted have moved to other locations like the nearby Chinese Theatre, while the AMC locations at The Grove, Burbank and Century City have replaced it as the launch pad for specialty films and Oscar hopefuls’ limited releases. Back in 2021, TheWrap reported that the Cinerama Dome’s decline had begun even before the pandemic, with annual ticket grosses sliding nearly 15% from 2017 to 2019.

Yet the Cinerama Dome carries a special place in the hearts of many Angeleno cinephiles. It was a place where filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Jon M. Chu and Christopher Nolan regularly showed up to see films. It became known as the theater where Academy voters often saw the movies they would later vote to win the Best Picture Oscar.

A movie palace for the 21st century

The boon in the early 2000s was quite a resurgence for the theater that was years in the making. While Cinerama is best known among cinephiles as an immersive three-projector film format introduced in the 1950s, the Cinerama Dome opened in 1963 with a reimagined single-projector 70mm Cinerama format that debuted with the comedy “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.” It wasn’t until 2002, when Arclight first launched with the Hollywood multiplex, that the Dome screened classic films with the original three-projector Cinerama reels.

Arclight sold that capability as part of the multiplex’s appeal: offering locals and tourists alike a chance to see films in a classic Hollywood movie palace. This happened at a time in the early 2000s when various business interests were trying to turn Hollywood – the neighborhood, not the industry – back into a tourist hotspot befitting what visitors might imagine the global filmmaking capital to be.

[ophone]

Originally Posted by mwynn

Or Sports Ball stadiums.

Better spending that money on getting people to exercise a little if they're able to physically, which in the end is much cheaper, so more money left for culture.

[mwynn]

Originally Posted by ophone

Better spending that money on getting people to exercise a little if they're able to physically, which in the end is much cheaper, so more money left for culture.

Oh those stadiums are not for regular people to use. They are for the cheap sports ball team owners.

[BluBonnet]

This how they going to win the Tik Tok generation over?


+

[vertigop1ayer]

Originally Posted by mwynn

I think that should go both ways. The mega theaters should be supporting the communities like the smaller theaters do. There is no give and take with this, the corporations just take and force people to accept how they operate. If they fail no worries they will be bailed out.

It'd be interesting to see some kind of deal run in a few cities for a business like a theater. I am envisioning something like certain tax incentives, low-interest loans, or public funds with clear terms for things like staffing. We're not talking about a small town handing a large theater chain $10M for a range of renovations and then only being required to hold a certain level of employment for a year or something so they can quickly be off the hook and have effectively just taken money from the community. If it benefits the theater (or any business) long term, great. Genuinely. But it must be a long-term benefit for the community it serves as well. So just throwing a bunch of tax incentives is not solving the issue.

Non-profit theaters are an option. Wouldn't be opposed to experimenting with a city or state-owned theater too, just to see how it works. Libraries aren't really a direct comparison because a movie theater is somewhat more like a book store than a library. But if some of these ideas fail, it'd at least be worth the experiment to understand why and see if refinements can work or if the concept is flawed at its core.

I know it's obvious, but in general movie theaters and movies in general don't have quite the same centrality to culture that they once did. With all the additional things competing for people's free time and money, it's also a reality that there isn't going to be a market for as many theaters as there once were in a commercial sense. That's where there's a decision to be made as a society whether or not this should remain a smaller business than it once was, like say comic books, which have never been seen as enduring art rightly or wrongly, or if it should be treated more like art and history, something most towns of any size should have and supported by the community.

[ctujackbauer]

Originally Posted by vertigop1ayer

It'd be interesting to see some kind of deal run in a few cities for a business like a theater. I am envisioning something like certain tax incentives, low-interest loans, or public funds with clear terms for things like staffing. We're not talking about a small town handing a large theater chain $10M for a range of renovations and then only being required to hold a certain level of employment for a year or something so they can quickly be off the hook and have effectively just taken money from the community. If it benefits the theater (or any business) long term, great. Genuinely. But it must be a long-term benefit for the community it serves as well. So just throwing a bunch of tax incentives is not solving the issue.

Non-profit theaters are an option. Wouldn't be opposed to experimenting with a city or state-owned theater too, just to see how it works. Libraries aren't really a direct comparison because a movie theater is somewhat more like a book store than a library. But if some of these ideas fail, it'd at least be worth the experiment to understand why and see if refinements can work or if the concept is flawed at its core.

I know it's obvious, but in general movie theaters and movies in general don't have quite the same centrality to culture that they once did. With all the additional things competing for people's free time and money, it's also a reality that there isn't going to be a market for as many theaters as there once were in a commercial sense. That's where there's a decision to be made as a society whether or not this should remain a smaller business than it once was, like say comic books, which have never been seen as enduring art rightly or wrongly, or if it should be treated more like art and history, something most towns of any size should have and supported by the community.

The free market's customers, not corporations and not society, decide whether the business grows or shrinks (we're not going to be having up and down votes on a multiplex theater any time soon.) We cut down on a fair amount of theaters in the pandemic and thankfully it doesn't look like we will have to go back to that.

Without capitalism we don't get the customer-friendly innovations like stadium seating, recliners, reserved seating, Dolby Cinema, IMAX/LieMAX, and probably the biggest innovation to hit: the all you can eat subscriptions.

Something like AMC's A-List wouldn't exist without the no-holds-barred market we have. Or Regal Unlimited. And to a lesser extent Harkins' popcorn perks, Cinemark's, and Fandango's subscriptions too.

[sandman slim]

Originally Posted by MuffinMcFluffin

The problem is butts in seats. Get people in the door first, then resolve the rest on an as needed basis. Give them a reason to want to come back, even to see the same movie twice.

And

The problem is shortsightedness. Customers are sick of the experience that theaters are giving them, that they find their home experience much more pleasurable. This includes convenience, but the big one is costs. You keep saying that they have to raise prices somewhere. No, they have to raise revenue. Some folks understand that you have to move backwards first to go forward, though. Netflix wasn't profitable for years when they started out, but they understood it cost a little to make a little.

You won't make money if people don't come through your door, and you won't make more money if people don't return. Shit, make tickets cost a dollar for a week. Advertise it, run it through all them social medias, let word of mouth take over, and watch the flood gates open. Hope that you have enough staff for that week to run operations, give people a good time, and hope they come back for more at a little price hike the next week. It's like selling drugs off the street, man.

Problem is, there are actually two levels of customer. You're only thinking about it as the "movie theater customer", standing in line to buy your ticket & wishing it was cheaper. But the theater is also a customer to the movie studios, and they'd never be happy getting 50 cents for a dollar ticket to see the product they spent $300 million on. Corporate greed is of course a factor, but in general, prices are much higher because the movies cost a lot more to make & there are two groups wanting to make a profit off of them. The theater may make most of their money from concessions, but the studios make all of their profit from the tickets. Cutting them down to one dollar would put the studios out of business.

[BluBonnet]

Studios do not, in fact, “make all of their profit from the tickets;” the theatrical window may in fact be the most rapidly-shrinking source of revenues for the entertainment conglomerates that own all of the major studios.

This is why most of them are perfectly happy offering movies digitally just a few weeks after their theatrical release - they know they get to keep more of what the customers pay that way.

[sandman slim]

I was, in fact, talking about the theatrical release portion of a film's life, as it is the only part that involves movie theaters, and I wasn't talking to you.

[BluBonnet]

Get youngsters into going to the movies and you'll have customers for life. Wonder how much effort the studios are actually making.

Could Gen Alpha Save Movie Theaters? New Survey Shows Why ‘Minecraft’ and ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Had Huge Success With Kids

Kids and preteens may reinvigorate the theatrical movie business, at least according to a new study by entertainment researchers NRG.

The report found that Gen Alpha, which consists of children born from roughly 2013 to 2025, is more interested in seeing movies in the big screen than older consumers. Roughly 59% of members of that generation said they enjoy watching movies in theaters more than at home, compared to 48% of Gen Z (people born between 1997 and 2012), 45% of Millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen X (people born between 1965 and 1980). The study’s authors suggest that the ubiquity of smartphones and streaming services has made younger consumers more interested in a night out at the multiplex.

“Unlike Millennials and older Gen Z-ers, who can still remember a time when watching movies at home meant going through the hassle of buying or renting a DVD or VHS tape, Gen Alpha is growing up in a world where on-demand is the default,” the authors write. “For them, there’s little novelty or excitement
to be found in an at-home movie night. By extension, that makes the experience of physically leaving the house and going to watch a movie in theaters feel all the more special.”

The data from the survey came from two studies of approximately 6,100 U.S. moviegoers between the ages of six to 60.

The report also found that Gen Alpha prefers to think of moviegoing as a social occasion. More
than half (55%) of Gen Alpha prefer seeing movies at the cinema with a group of friends, compared to just 31% of Millennials and 40% of Gen Z. And though the popular conception of younger people is that they are perpetually online and never far from their phones, the study found that fewer than
one-in-ten kids under 13 habitually use their phones in theaters. They also don’t appear to suffer from much shorter attention spans. Across the generations, most moviegoers say the ideal running time of a movie is just over two hours.

Given the social nature of moviegoing for younger customers, NRG asked Gen Alpha respondents about what franchises have the most cachet among their friends. It found that “Roblox” ranked first, with other video games like “Minecraft,” “Fortnight,” “Grand Theft Auto” and “Pokemon” rounding out the top five. “The Avengers” took sixth place, “Super Mario Bros.” was in seventh, “Spider-Man” came in eighth, “Lego” captured ninth and “Madden NFL” finished the top ten.

Other franchises with a passionate core of Gen Alpha fans included “Wicked” (12th place), “Spider-Verse” (13th place), “Wednesday” (17th place), “Stranger Things” (19th place) and “Batman” (20th place). Many of these properties, including “Minecraft,” which was one of the year’s biggest blockbusters, have been made into movies or shows. Can a “Roblox” film far off?

The study makes it clear why the singalong version of “KPop Demon Hunters” was a box office hit when it was released in theaters months after the film debuted on streaming. Twenty nine percent of Gen Alpha moviegoers said they were interested in attending singalong screenings. However, the largest contingent (65%) said they preferred premium large formats like IMAX and 54% said they wanted to see more 3D films or virtual reality experiences. Hmmm, if only all these things could be combined.

[mwynn]

Originally Posted by vertigop1ayer

It'd be interesting to see some kind of deal run in a few cities for a business like a theater. I am envisioning something like certain tax incentives, low-interest loans, or public funds with clear terms for things like staffing. We're not talking about a small town handing a large theater chain $10M for a range of renovations and then only being required to hold a certain level of employment for a year or something so they can quickly be off the hook and have effectively just taken money from the community. If it benefits the theater (or any business) long term, great. Genuinely. But it must be a long-term benefit for the community it serves as well. So just throwing a bunch of tax incentives is not solving the issue.

Non-profit theaters are an option. Wouldn't be opposed to experimenting with a city or state-owned theater too, just to see how it works. Libraries aren't really a direct comparison because a movie theater is somewhat more like a book store than a library. But if some of these ideas fail, it'd at least be worth the experiment to understand why and see if refinements can work or if the concept is flawed at its core.

I know it's obvious, but in general movie theaters and movies in general don't have quite the same centrality to culture that they once did. With all the additional things competing for people's free time and money, it's also a reality that there isn't going to be a market for as many theaters as there once were in a commercial sense. That's where there's a decision to be made as a society whether or not this should remain a smaller business than it once was, like say comic books, which have never been seen as enduring art rightly or wrongly, or if it should be treated more like art and history, something most towns of any size should have and supported by the community.

A lot of things can be kind of compared. Like a cell phone, the primary purpose of it is generally for communication. Either calls, or texts. Now you have games and a camera. Yet there is not more you can add to it. So people are pretty much buying the same thing. With the Sphere in Vegas you are kind of turning the theater into a theme park ride, and charging over 100 dollars for it. If theaters keep losing customers. They have no choice but to charge more, because it is a profit center. The people left behind have to pick up the slack for those that left. Lowering prices for any length of time is the end of it. Running a movie theater with one screen is expensive. Imagine the cost of a mega plex with twenty screens. The cost of doing business is going to continue to rise and the customers are going to pay the price.

[PhysicalMediaMaestro]

Originally Posted by BluBonnet

Get youngsters into going to the movies and you'll have customers for life. Wonder how much effort the studios are actually making.

Could Gen Alpha Save Movie Theaters? New Survey Shows Why ‘Minecraft’ and ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Had Huge Success With Kids

That doesn't surprise me at all. Here's another article with the same findings:

https://www.thewrap.com/kids-biggest...vie-purchases/

Because of this, Hollywood loves to make movies where adults who hate kids are transformed into adults who love kids. They want the adults to have as many kids as possible, just so they can sell more movie tickets.

One such example is the 1993 film "Dennis The Menace". The cranky Mr. Wilson (Walther Matthau, a perfect casting choice) is understandably and believably fed up by the antics of Dennis. When Dennis' parents have to leave on a business trip, they leave Mr. Wilson and his wife in charge of Dennis because no one else wants to babysit Dennis. And when Dennis ruins the presentation of Mr. Wilson's prized flower in more ways than one (in addition to seeing that the film's villain, Switchblade Sam, has stolen one of Mr. Wilson's prized possessions), Mr. Wilson delivers this speech to Dennis:

"You're a pest. A menace. A selfish, spoiled little boy and I've no use for you. You took something from me that I can never get back, something that means more to me than you ever will. You understand? I don't want to see you, I don't want to know you. Get out of my way."

Regardless of whether or not you agree or disagree with Mr. Wilson's assessment of Dennis, we can all agree that the speech is perfectly in character for Mr. Wilson.

Dennis runs away in search of Mr. Wilson's stolen property. Now you would think that Mr. Wilson would be thrilled that Dennis is gone, considering all the trouble he's caused. But no. Mr. Wilson has a guilt trip, and begins searching for Dennis along with everyone else in town. And when Dennis returns, Mr. Wilson is the first to greet and embrace Dennis, and Dennis' mother and father come second.

This makes no sense at all.

See what they did here? They destroyed Mr. Wilson's character in service of "the message". I'm not against people having kids, I'm against going too far in changing the personality of a fictional character that has appeared in newspaper comics for four decades before the movie's release to promote people having kids.

[DR Herbert West]

Originally Posted by PhysicalMediaMaestro

That doesn't surprise me at all. Here's another article with the same findings:

[Show spoiler]
https://www.thewrap.com/kids-biggest...vie-purchases/

Because of this, Hollywood loves to make movies where adults who hate kids are transformed into adults who love kids. They want the adults to have as many kids as possible, just so they can sell more movie tickets.

One such example is the 1993 film "Dennis The Menace". The cranky Mr. Wilson (Walther Matthau, a perfect casting choice) is understandably and believably fed up by the antics of Dennis. When Dennis' parents have to leave on a business trip, they leave Mr. Wilson and his wife in charge of Dennis because no one else wants to babysit Dennis. And when Dennis ruins the presentation of Mr. Wilson's prized flower in more ways than one (in addition to seeing that the film's villain, Switchblade Sam, has stolen one of Mr. Wilson's prized possessions), Mr. Wilson delivers this speech to Dennis:

"You're a pest. A menace. A selfish, spoiled little boy and I've no use for you. You took something from me that I can never get back, something that means more to me than you ever will. You understand? I don't want to see you, I don't want to know you. Get out of my way."

Regardless of whether or not you agree or disagree with Mr. Wilson's assessment of Dennis, we can all agree that the speech is perfectly in character for Mr. Wilson.

Dennis runs away in search of Mr. Wilson's stolen property. Now you would think that Mr. Wilson would be thrilled that Dennis is gone, considering all the trouble he's caused. But no. Mr. Wilson has a guilt trip, and begins searching for Dennis along with everyone else in town. And when Dennis returns, Mr. Wilson is the first to greet and embrace Dennis, and Dennis' mother and father come second.

This makes no sense at all.

See what they did here? They destroyed Mr. Wilson's character in service of "the message". I'm not against people having kids, I'm against going too far in changing the personality of a fictional character that has appeared in newspaper comics for four decades before the movie's release to promote people having kids.

^ Real dedication to the bit.