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Thursday, June 06, 2002

By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor

Movie distributors and theater chains have long regarded Pittsburgh as a movie market where the gross receipts don't measure up to the size of the market. In a Post-Gazette comparison with 15 similar-sized cities, Pittsburgh has ranked last in recent years in movie grosses.

But how does Pittsburgh compare to similar-size markets in terms of theaters themselves? Here's a brief look at how facilities here compare to those in Cleveland, a city similar to Pittsburgh in many ways and located just 120 miles away.

Downtown theaters

In Pittsburgh, first-run mainstream movies opened exclusively in Downtown theaters until 1976. Cleveland did not have a mainstream cinema in its downtown from the late 1960s until 1990, when an 11-screen multiplex opened in the Tower City Center shopping complex. Now, Pittsburgh has just one Downtown theater, the single-screen Harris

In the suburbs

Cleveland's theaters seem evenly placed throughout the region, but with a pattern of moving farther from downtown and into bedroom suburbs in surrounding counties. Allegheny County has a predominance of theaters in the south and east suburbs, with only one theater in the western suburbs and just three -- all on the McKnight Road/Route 19 corridor -- in the fast-growing North Hills.

Chains

Until Loews and Destinta entered the local market beginning in 1999, Showcase Cinemas and Carmike (and its locally owned predecessor, Cinema World) controlled most of the first-run theaters in Pittsburgh. Cleveland usually has had a variety of chains -- the current group includes AMC, Atlas, Regal, Loews, Cinemark and Magic Johnson Cinemas.

Local ownership

While chains historically ran most of the first-run houses in Cleveland -- Loews operated several of the city's downtown movie palaces -- Pittsburgh has a long history of local ownership. Cinema World, purchased by Georgia-based Carmike in 1994, and its predecessors literally owned the market for years or shared it with Massachusetts-based Showcase Cinemas. Even now, local theater owners include Mulone, CineMagic and former Cinema World president Jeff Lewine.

Age of facilities

Most of Cleveland's present movie theaters were built or rebuilt in the past 20 years. Pittsburgh has seen a half dozen or so new theaters spring up in the past three years, but it still has a lot of older theaters that were split into multiplexes and lack state-of-the-art amenities.

Art-film scene

Pittsburgh has a tradition of screening independent and foreign films -- current exhibitors include the three Pittsburgh Filmmakers theaters and the CineMagic theaters. Cleveland's art-film scene is concentrated at one theater, the multiscreen Cedar-Lee in Cleveland Heights.

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