From Main Street to the multiplex, cinemas hope to expand again
As a Bethel moviegoer exited a February showing of “Poor Things” depicting the tale of a woman brought back from the dead, “That was a wild one!” escaped her lips with a breathless laugh.
As Jaimie and Frank Lockwood see it, it is the kind of response that only the big screen can draw forth — and what drove them to bring the mothballed Bethel Cinema back to life as Greenwood Features.
At the threshold of their second Academy Awards weekend running a community movie theater, the Lockwoods are quick to admit that their initial stroll down the red carpet of the cinema industry has been a bumpy one, including the 2023 Hollywood strikes that pushed back release dates for some movies they had been counting on to boost ticket sales.
“The past few years have been very hard because we have spent a lot of money in rent, and it has not really balanced out,” Jaimie Lockwood said. “Things are heading in a better direction — and we have also learned a
lot. We knew nothing going into this.”
They are not alone. Dealing with the triple whammy of streaming, the COVID-19 pandemic and last year’s Hollywood strikes, the United States lost nearly 2,800 screens on a net basis between 2019 and 2023, dropping the total to about 38,400 as estimated by the National Association of Theatre Owners.
That equates roughly to one screen for every 8,700 people in the United States. But Connecticut has a smaller footprint on the heels of
the pandemic. Its 300 screens work out to about one auditorium for every 12,000 residents, if omitting drive-in venues and a few theaters with niche audiences like on college campuses or the Naval Submarine Base New London in Groton.
More screens are coming soon at reincarnated cinemas in Waterbury and New Canaan, and one industry veteran is eyeballing a few more candidate theaters to potentially reopen in southwestern Connecticut. But movie theater attendance remains down by a third from before
the pandemic, showcasing the challenges faced by operators large and small.
A step back amid a setback
Harold Blank is the owner of the Shoreline Entertainment Group, a Nahant, Mass.-based company that operates Madison Cinemas and Mystic Luxury Cinemas, as well as the Westbrook Cinemas which it took over last year. Opening in 1912 during a first boom of cinema construction nationally, Madison Cinemas is the oldest operating theater in Connecticut that is screening firstrun movies today, of those listed in the Cinema Treasures log of historic theaters.