Small movie theaters trying to find a niche in a megaplex era
-
Is it 2010 -- or 1939? It's hard to tell from the marquee above The Strand on Main Street in Zelienople. In the early 1980s, The Strand closed its doors, but it reopened last year. -
The Denis Theater is closed, but there are efforts to reopen it. -
With luck -- and hard work -- the old Denis Theater may reopen. -
The recently closed Hollywood Theater awaits a new owner. -
The Oaks Theater, in Oakmont, still shows a lot of first-run movies, but it's texploring events that could capture the imagination of its audience, such as opera series and concert events. -
The Penn Hills Cinemas in the Penn Hills Shopping Center.
Share with others:
The seat folds down, the lights dim and the screen brightens. For most, the movie theater is a familiar experience.
The United States has 6,039 movie theaters with 39,028 cinema screens. As the industry continues to shift toward theaters with more screens, megaplexes -- 16 or more screens -- have become the main source of theater growth. The closing of single-screen theaters and miniplexes -- two to seven screens -- nationwide means that nearly half of the screens in the country are located in multiplexes -- eight to 15 screens.
The Motion Picture Association of America, which collects detailed figures about movie trends, found that more than two-thirds of the U.S. and Canadian population saw a movie at a theater in 2009 and most people saw an average of 6.5.
In 2010, the movie theater experience, generally speaking, is the multiplex one. Small neighborhood movie theaters are dwindling, most pushed out by the rise of the multiplex and the fall of the weekly movie-going culture.
Nationwide, the numbers are not good for small theaters. When the motion picture association put out its 2009 report, the United States had 6,039 theaters. Of those, 75 percent were multi- or megaplexes, meaning they have at least eight screens; 21 percent were miniplexes, having two to seven screens; and only 4 percent were single-screen theaters.
A few of these small theaters in the Pittsburgh area are bucking the trend and staying open. Some -- the Denis Theatre in Mt. Lebanon, for example -- are trying to reopen and stake a place in their community's future.
But bucking the megaplex is not easy; the past few months have seen the closing of several Pittsburgh-area movie theaters, such as the Squirrel Hill Theater and the Hollywood Theatre in Dormont, which had just reopened in August.
It's survival of the fittest, and when it comes to community movie theaters, only a few are surviving.
There was a time when the community movie theater business was a booming one. Ed Blank, a film critic at the Pittsburgh Press for 25 years, can remember when it was not unusual for five to seven movie theaters to be within walking distance of his East End home.
First Published June 17, 2010 12:00 am
