Is repertory programming actually the best shot suburban single-screens and smaller multiplexes have at surviving?

As first-run moviegoing continues to be dominated by tentpoles best seen on the most cutting-edge screen possible, older films seem to be making a real comeback at independently run cinemas.

Optimism for the theatrical movie business is in the air as CinemaCon, the annual tradeshow for exhibitors, takes place this week in Las Vegas. Part of this seems to simply stem from a natural tendency to put on a brave face for what should be a celebration of the industry, and part of it seems to be a media halo effect from Wells Fargo double-upgrading its rating of Cinemark stock last week. As I’ve written about recently here, I’d love to be able to drink the Kool Aid, but even acknowledging the slate improvements coming in the second half of the year, I struggle to see the major box office rebound that others now appear to be labeling as a surety.

Certainly, the box office will get better as we move into summer and the more title-rich second half of the year. But anywhere close to 2019 levels, even on a month-to-month basis? I have significant doubts. Perhaps I’m beating a dead horse here, but I would really encourage those convinced of a second-half 2024 box office resurgence to venture more than 100 miles outside of Los Angeles or New York and patronize one of AMC or Regal’s locations in a medium-sized suburb. (Cinemark, while far from perfect, does do a better job than their two major competitors.) If you choose to accept this mission, you should not go to a tip-top grosser – perhaps choose a theater that regularly ranks somewhere between #300-750 nationally on any given weekend. Which is to say, still in the top 20% of theaters in America, but not necessarily a “crown jewel” that AMC or Regal is investing most heavily in.

What you’re likely to find may surprise you if you routinely spend your moviegoing dollars at an elite grosser like, say, the AMC Century City 15, or at a smaller regional chain with greater care for the movie experience like Harkins or B&B. Let’s take my local Regal Edwards San Marcos 18 here in North San Diego County, which is actually one of the better locations for film presentation in the area.

First, you drive up to the theater and attempt to park. I say “attempt” because the parking spot lines haven’t been repainted in over a decade and it’s often hard to make out where one space ends and another begins. But it’s never that busy these days, so if you take up two, no big deal. Then, you walk up to the box office. Ooop, there’s no functional box office or employee to greet you anymore – just a row of kiosks and little direction. Next, you make your way to the concession stand, which often has longer-than-necessary lines full of people just trying to buy tickets because they couldn’t figure out the kiosk situation. You spend almost $10 on a small popcorn. Against all odds, you make your way to the auditorium, where the new laser projector is just slightly misaligned so the image has a bunch of green and magenta highlights; you can’t quite put your finger on what’s wrong, but it doesn’t look just right. Not to mention, they don’t use screen masking anymore, so the CinemaScope frame appears letterboxed, like it does on your TV at home. If it happened to rain in the morning, there might be some residual roof water dripping from the ceiling on a row or two, which have simply been caution-taped off for the day.

Again, this is the theater I often choose to go to, because the situation is better there than at some other local joints, where the projection is really botched or the air conditioning doesn’t always work or there are safety concerns in the evenings, or all of the above. And it’s a theater very comparable to what’s available to most Americans in most markets. My point in detailing all of this is to say, even if an improved slate encourages people to go back to the movies later this year, the experience they have when they go back is likely to be less than stellar. Sure, it may not be bad enough to discourage them from going to future movies they’re interested in seeing, but what the industry truly needs in order to rebound is a moviegoing experience so satisfying, it makes people want to come back to the movies just to go to the movies on a regular basis. That’s what we once did. At most suburban AMC and Regal locations – i.e., the theaters most Americans will patronize – this simply isn’t going to happen.

And yet, AMC and Regal, along with Cinemark and about a dozen other significant regional players, are going to keep controlling the lion’s share of the first-run box office for the foreseeable future. For better or worse – mostly for worse, I would argue – this is what the studios want the exhibition industry to look like. The situation has gotten to be pretty untenable for smaller, independently owned cinemas. If you are one of these cinemas and your business is showing first-run movies, the studios don’t really care about you and often saddle you with terms far less profitable than you’d get back in the day, especially as fewer and fewer films leg out over the course of many weekends. If your business is second-run movies, you’re lucky to even still be alive, with most titles hitting PVOD (if not SVOD) within 45 days, sometimes far less, and audiences recognizing it. It’s brutal, watching the big exhibitors who care far less about the moviegoing experience than their smaller counterparts tighten their grip on the space. But the studios would be up shit creek if one of the big guys truly went belly-up and had to close all of their locations, so they have to help prop them up.

Which brings me – in a characteristically roundabout way – to the real topic of this post: How can independently owned single-screens and smaller multiplexes survive in this hostile exhibition environment? While those in more rural or exurban areas without corporate competition may be able to continue chugging along, many suburban locations with formidable competition in the neighborhood are facing serious struggles to stay alive. Not only have they been ailing from lack of quality product, they now have to compete with the subscription programs offered by the bigger exhibitors. Even if a smaller cinema provides a much better experience than AMC or Regal, many frequent moviegoers are going to end up picking the corporate option because they can see all the movies they want for the low-low price of $20-25 a month. How ironic that the very theaters that may typically provide the best moviegoing experience – what the industry needs to inspire consumers to keep coming back, breaking the current rut – are the ones that Hollywood has completely turned its back on.

Many of these smaller theaters, primarily in suburban corners of bigger cities with population centers, are discovering an unexpected, but compelling answer to their problems: repertory bookings. While several media outlets have written about the flourishing post-pandemic revival circuits in New York and especially Los Angeles, less attention has been paid to the surge in box office from older films in other regions. Mind you, there are no publicly available gross receipts to be able to quantify this on an industry-wide level, as there are with first-run features, but the trend is very clear to those of us who watch theater bookings as if they were a professional sport (or is it only me?). As first-run and especially second-run exhibition become progressively difficult businesses for the little guys, many have turned to an increasing amount of “retro” programming with great success.

Some theaters I’ve patronized recently that exemplify this trend include the following…

Here in San Diego County, the La Paloma Theatre in Encinitas is our last remaining single-screen in daily operation. For years, it had been run exclusively as a second-run theater with an arthouse bent, with private buyouts (especially for surf movies, as it’s only a few blocks from the beach) driving a good portion of their business. Those remain key features of the programming – this week, you can check out The Taste of Things and Perfect Days, along with a program of surf shorts. But since the pandemic, repertory shows have played an increasing role there as well. In the past couple of months alone, the La Paloma has held multiple showings of titles running the gamut of tastes: Groundhog Day, Steamboat Bill Jr., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Field of Dreams, alongside family programming including The Iron Giant and the first three Toy Story films. As a nearby resident, I try to patronize the place at least a couple of times a month, and these shows have been among the busiest I’ve attended. The Valentine’s Day Princess Bride and Eternal Sunshine combo, in particular, was bursting with patrons. Not to mention, the La Paloma has been showing last year’s A24 reissue of Stop Making Sense continuously since October, with its once-weekly showing still often drawing a considerable turnout.

The Gardena Cinema, the last family-run theater in Los Angeles’ South Bay suburbs, reopened after the pandemic with the same first-run schedule it had maintained for decades. But when business was decidedly slower than in years past – I was the sole patron occupying the 800-seat hall on one saddening occasion – proprietor Judy Kim began to experiment more with older titles. The theater started to gain a bit more traction with these, drawing patrons from a wider geographical circle – so much so that their calendar has now shifted towards repertory programming in a big way. While the Gardena still shows enough first-run fare to maintain their status as an Oscar qualifying venue, they are making bigger waves with their diverse array of revival bookings, with the added benefit of 3-D projection capabilities. In the coming month or so, moviegoers can catch Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Sleepaway Camp (with live commentary from star Felissa Rose), the 3-D version of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the 1968 “Trash Mex” title La Mujer Murcielago, and Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo at the Gardena.

During my Spring Training trip to the Phoenix area, I had the true pleasure of experiencing South Tempe’s Pollack Cinemas, one of the most innovatively booked strip-mall multiplexes in the country, for the first time. It’s a six-screen former UA house that has been independently run by the Arizona real estate magnate Michael Pollack since the early ’90s, largely operating as a second-run “discount” house (tickets are still just $3.50!). But now, mixed in with the move-over titles that recently played local megaplexes, are older films with general audience interest. They each show daily for a weeklong schedule, just like the newer titles playing the theater. I saw Romancing the Stone on a Friday night, in an auditorium that felt very much like one that you could have seen it in back in 1984 (but with newer, very comfortable seats!). Right now, at the Pollack, one can catch An American Werewolf in London, National Lampoon’s Animal House, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, and Wreck-It Ralph daily. Several Star Wars, James Bond, and Back to the Future titles appear on their Coming Soon roster. Paired with the theater lobby’s insane collection of movie memorabilia and arcade games (pictured below) and a very well-trained, welcoming staff, Pollack offers an amazingly unique discount theater experience that might just provide a future model for others with similar facilities.

Pollack Cinemas Tempe's Highly Decorative Lobby Area

For decades, beginning in the VHS era, the prevailing wisdom seemed to be that moviegoers had no interest in seeing films in theaters that they could easily watch at home. That remains a key part of the struggle when it comes to recently-released movies quickly made available on streaming services (especially for free on SVOD platforms). But as the above examples illustrate, along with dozens of other theaters like them, there seems to be an increasing openness and even eagerness among moviegoers to catch “retro” showings in a theatrical setting. From what I’ve personally observed attending such shows, there are some pretty clear reasons for this trend:

1.     Lack of consistent streaming availability often makes going to the movie theater easier when you are interested in a particular older title. Now that most suburban markets are without a single video rental store, and the streaming landscape remains such a mishmash of availability and subscription terms, sometimes going to your local cinema is just plain easier for some. While this is likely not the case for most moviegoers – if it was, theaters would not be in the situation they are in – it appears to be the case for enough consumers that certain repertory shows can drive very respectable attendance. This is to say, they can definitely attract enough people to sustain one theater that is playing a movie without having to deal with competitors showing the same movie that week.

2.     At the same time, at-home streaming has actually softened consumers’ strong bias in favor of new content. One of the most positive outcomes of consumers’ overreliance on streaming in the past decade has been that it has opened people up to a wider range of movies and TV shows. Because of the perception that these are free on a streaming service, people tend to experiment more and sample a more diverse array of content. The notion of a “release date” has, in tandem, gotten fuzzier; I’ve had too many interactions to count where people have told me about a “new movie” they just watched on Netflix, when it actually came out in theaters six or seven years ago. Through this process, I’ve noticed that openness to watching older films in theaters has actually expanded in a similar way, as people have become a bit less obsessed with release dates.

3.     Especially coming out of the pandemic, Americans crave affordable social experiences (as I wrote about in my last post), and “throwback” showings are often seen as more interactive than first-run movies. While I would never advocate for allowing talking in theaters, I do think the viewing experience for many repertory titles – especially those with a high nostalgia proposition – can be more emotive and reactive, without spoiling it for fellow moviegoers. The whole idea of a shared experience is amplified by the fact that you are occupying a room with other people who are likewise choosing to watch a movie they could watch at home in the company of others. And, as a bonus for movie theater owners, patrons of these showings seem to be much likelier to shell out top-dollar for concessions to get into the mood/spirit of the occasion (particularly if alcohol is on tap) than they are at first-run shows, or so my inside sources inform me!

4.     Today’s consumers are obsessed with planning their outings in advance, and “calendar” programming enables this. I personally hate this social trend, and I think it’s a toxic indicator of the control-freaks we’ve all become. I wish cinemas still saw robust walkup business. We’d be in a much healthier cultural climate if there were still people who just “went to the movies” on Friday night and picked something off the marquee upon arrival. But those people are increasingly rare birds. Today’s consumer wants to have everything mapped out to minimize their already sky-high anxiety. And repertory shows can be scheduled well in advance, with really creative theater-level marketing (both in lobbies and on social media). Talking to exhibitors, it’s clear that the farther older titles are scheduled in advance, the higher attendance they typically attract.

5.     The range of older titles available to the average theater on DCP is far wider than it was on 35mm film, and extending these runs over multiple days/weeks is much easier and more affordable for the exhibitor. While celluloid-obsessed film bros won’t like to admit it, DCP has really democratized repertory booking, which was practically impossible for many theaters – especially multiplexes with platter projection – as recently as ten years ago. But now, theaters have a massive catalog of older titles available to book. And because shipping heavy film reels is no longer a concern, the upfront cost of each booking has, in most instances, dropped precipitously from what it once was. There are now a lot more revival options open to suburban, digital-only exhibitors and, in turn, moviegoers.

Last year, I tried to imagine an altered theatrical ecosystem with a new kind of “dollar theater,” partly as a potential option for all of the suburban single-screens and smaller multiplexes that would soon likely be rendered extinct if the traditional first- and second-run models remained the lay of the land. While I still think there’s some value in the ideas I outlined in that piece (please do check it out if you didn’t at the time!), my recent observations of the success of repertory programming at these types of venues really does have me brainstorming in this direction... Could calendar programming, long believed to be on its way out of basically every moviegoing market except for NYC and perhaps LA, actually help keep certain older theaters in farther-flung markets alive and even thriving? I’m beginning to see the path, and a fairly broad audience for this fare.

Not to mention, one of the funny things about this type of programming at this type of theater is it seems to make the average patron a lot more forgiving of the lack of “modern” amenities, a consumer expectation that typically sullies their Yelp reviews. Suddenly, older theaters’ uncomfortable chairs, lack of restaurant-menu style concessions, and screen blemishes become “charming,” rather than obstacles to a satisfying theatrical experience. Many moviegoers would absolutely never agree to watch the latest Star Wars movie at my local La Paloma Theatre when they could see it on an IMAX or Dolby Cinema screen nearby, but hundreds turned out, with their families in tow, for the theater’s showings of the original trilogy in 2022. Repertory programming changes patrons’ technological expectations in a way that benefits older, smaller cinemas, especially when these cinemas get the basic fundamentals (good projection, good popcorn) right.

Of course, the giants of exhibition are increasingly trying to get into the repertory game, as well. They’re not blind to these trends. Not only is Fathom Events, the joint venture between the Big Three exhibitors, in the midst of setting company records for box office, owing hugely to repertory content, the exhibitors themselves are all upping the number of older titles they show. For example, Regal is showcasing the films of Christopher Nolan throughout April, as well as holding 25th Anniversary showings of The Mummy at the end of the month. This week, AMC is running two shows a day of An Officer and a Gentleman at select locations and has just wrapped up a Blumhouse retrospective that included Insidious and The Invisible Man. And that’s not even mentioning the flashback programming being offered across chains this month, including the entire Spider-Man franchise and select A24 films in IMAX (next up is Hereditary). And even still, the Big Three are nowhere as aggressive in this department as mid-size players like Alamo Drafthouse, which runs repertory shows multiple days a week at most locations.

That all being said, older films and specialty programming are largely about hole-plugging for the big circuits. These provide a great stopgap measure to generate revenue between big films for them. But from what I’ve observed at the smaller, independent houses, this type of programming may very well play a more pivotal role in their future survival. Especially if dialogue-driven cinema aimed chiefly at older, affluent audiences continues to falter theatrically, pivoting to older titles on a more regular basis seems like it’s where the demand is, outside the big chains. That would have been a crazy statement pre-pandemic, but here we are. As I sat alongside around fifty teenagers and early twentysomethings taking in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a movie I saw on opening day when they were in diapers or not even born, on a weeknight in February at the La Paloma, I began to feel more optimistic that there is a way for theaters outside the chains to survive, despite the harsh climate. It’s just going to take some creative programming – largely a lost art outside the big cities, universities, and non-profits for the last few decades – to fully realize it.