Over the holiday weekend, my wife and I had a scheme to meet another couple in Malibu, have a little dinner and go to the local theatre to see CASINO ROYALE. Best laid plans, baby. We drove over the Malibu Canyon pass and arrived around 4:10pm, only to be told that the 7:00pm show had already been sold out for half an hour. Tickets were available for tomorrow’s show, of course. The theatre was an independent twinplex, and they were showing HAPPY FEET on the other screen. We opted to just have dinner and ditch the movie.

First of all, how lucky is that independent theatre? The top two movies in the country and they’re both showing there at the same time! It’s hard to turn a profit with a small venue like that. The reason there are so many 14-plexes around the country is even if you have 13 loser movies, the fourteenth is bound to take up the slack. Plus, when it’s slow you can have one ticket seller and one concession attendant – divide that cost up between 14 houses and you got your economy of scale there. A twin is like a farm which specializes in two crops, say Okra and Corn. People stop eating okra and you’re half screwed already. All it takes is a flock of aggressive crows to put you out of business.

And independent twin is an even worse proposition, because you have no bargaining power. Even if the theatre down the street is another twin, that theatre might be owned by Regal Entertainment Group, and they can negotiate for bookings based on the idea that if you give us your good movies here, we’ll put your bad movies in our 14-plex in Ontario. Having a big theatre chain is like having the biggest multiplex ever.

As it happens, the twin in Malibu is the ONLY theatre for miles, so they’re not competing with the twin down the street. It’s them or Netflix, baby. So they’re doing just fine. But they’re not huge auditoriums, so when they get a couple of plum bookings like this they are sold out a day in advance. From my experience, I bet the employees hate it. They’re paid by the hour whether there are 5 people watching or 500, but when there are 500 they actually have to do some work.

Everyone who works there, I bet, will be grateful when January comes and the movies they have are either the same ones they have now, tapering off to easy to handle levels, or a new crop of big budget studio misfires that weren’t considered strong enough to compete in December. In either event they’ll all have time to challenge each other to ad-hoc trivia contests or flirt, which is why they took the job in the first place.

I wonder what will happen to this theatre in the future. It’s probably profitable (they just remodeled after a fire, which either means they’re doing well enough to remodel instead of abandon the location, or they’re just scraping by and needed the insurance fire to raise building improvement money. Either way they’re not failing.) but if its too profitable it will attract the attention of the big chains, who would buy it up and eventually abandon it when they realize it’s only a twin. And then Malibu would be left without a movie theater, and the well-to-do residents would have to drive 5 miles to Santa Monica to see a movie. For some Malibu residents, if they wanted to see a movie in Santa Monica they would BUY Santa Monica.

If that twinplex ever closes down, come to think of it, an unusually high percentage of Malibu residents may have screening room in their own houses. I hope they’ll do the right thing and open them up to the public, and by the public I mean other people with screening rooms who couldn’t book the print at their house.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 4:46 pm and is filed under General, Motion Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.