Bill Banowsky, Violet Crown
Let’s get this straight: Violet Crown has not gone out of business. The independently owned cinema located in the Railyard plans to wait out and adapt to the pandemic.
But its closure since spring speaks to a loss many filmgoers have felt across the nation in 2020.
“The year without movies,” says Bill Banowsky, who owns Violet Crown and two other cinemas elsewhere in the country.
“This is the year the movie business structurally changed forever in ways we don’t fully understand yet,” he says. “It’s a year when a lot of businesses around the country will fail, including many in the cinema industry. That’s just a fact.”
According to the National Association of Theatre Owners, 96 percent of U.S. cinemas have reported over 70 percent in losses in 2020. The association predicts 70 percent of its small and midsize theaters will go bankrupt or out of business by January.
Banowsky says he expects Violet Crown, which has been around for five years, to somehow survive, perhaps by renting out each of his 11 cinemas to individual groups of parties. They would be made up of people who know one another and know enough to socially distance in the cinema until the crisis subsides and life — and going to the movies — gets back to whatever the new normal becomes once health orders are loosened.
“You’ll just pick a time and day where you can rent your auditorium, then you select what movie you want,” he says. That pick could be a film in wide release or one of some 60 classic films Violet Crown has access to in its Jukebox Cinema program.
“There’s no question people are gonna be excited about getting out for movie night again,” Banowsky said.
Still, he had to first furlough, and then lay off more than 30 employees. And being closed for nine months has had a “huge negative economic impact” on his business.
“Our revenue was not just cut in half, but entirely,” he said. “We went from being a very profitable business operation from 2015, when we opened, through 2019, but since the end of March, we have had zero revenue.”
There’s also no question that something that was so much a part of Americans’ social lives is temporarily gone.
“The whole art of going to the movies is lost,” Banowsky says. “It’s been taken away from our society as an option.”