Hoping to lure moviegoers, Hartford theaters are stepping up their game
Luxury seating, food, and a sports bar part of big reopening plans
HARTFORD — The parking lot outside Apple Cinemas Xtreme on New Park Avenue in Hartford, an expanse of blacktop pockmarked by weeds, may soon be crowded again with cars carrying moviegoers looking for entertainment outside their homes after a 15-month COVID-19 lockdown.
It’s the same at the Apple Cinemas Luxury Dine-In, formerly the Spotlight Theatres, on Front Street in Hartford, where management is hoping for similar crowds when it opens June 25 with the screening of “Fast and Furious.”
Both theaters are due to open the same day, assuming final city permits are in hand.
Owner Siva Shan discounts the popularity of — and competition from — streaming services that entertained home-bound viewers during the coronavirus pandemic. Netflix, which added nearly 16 million subscribers in the first three months of last year, reported growth of 4 million subscribers in the same period this year as other forms of entertainment, such as movies, regain audiences.
Netflix has projected an increase of 1 million worldwide subscribers in the current April-June period, down from 10 million more
subscribers in the same three months of 2020.
“At the end of the day you can’t stay in the house forever,” Shan said. “You have to come out.”
Theaters, bars, most retail stores and a range of other businesses were hit hard when public health officials in Connecticut ordered them shut as the coronavirus pandemic swept Connecticut in March 2020.
Nationally, annual movie theater box office revenue dropped 81% last year, to $2.1 billion, according to IMDbPro. Already this year, movie theaters posted $818.8 million in revenue.
Shan has revamped his two theaters, reducing capacity to make room for large, popular and comfortable reclining seats with serving trays and cupholders. The Front Street theater now accommodates 300 moviegoers, half as many as before the pandemic.
He expects to make more money, even with fewer seats, as attendance rises in response to the improved seating.
The Front Street theater also will have a sports bar seating 50 and will offer seating along the sidewalk that wraps around to Columbus Boulevard from Front Street.
At the New Park Avenue 12-screen cinema, formerly Bow Tie Cinemas, the IMAX has 110 seats, down from 300. The 12 screens were reduced from 17 during a renovation.
Tom Nunan, one of the producers of “Crash,” the 2006 Oscar-winning film, and a lecturer at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, said audiences and theater owners can expect a booming production of movies to satisfy pent-up demand among movie-goers.
“There are going to be big summer releases, especially as the cinemas open up to full capacity,” he said Friday. “I predict that audiences will go rushing back in.”
He said there’s no evidence to support worries about audience members seated too closely together. “Quite the contrary, theaters are selling at capacity,” he said.
Nunan compared audiences flocking to cinemas with other venues such as sporting events and Broadway.
Gov. Ned Lamont on May 19 ordered an end to restrictions imposed 14 months earlier. Movie theaters were among the beneficiaries. Also bars were allowed to open indoors, the removal of event venue and stadium capacity limits and dropping of social distancing requirements.
Shan said theaters generally opened that day, with others delaying their return to business a week later just before the Memorial Day weekend.
He said he’s not planning a marketing campaign, preferring to keep a low profile “to make sure nothing goes wrong” in the first few weeks, such as not finding enough cooks, bartenders and servers in a labor force marred by worker shortages,
Shan, who has had no income during the pandemic, relied on some grants programs and borrowed money, he said. It will be a year and a half to two years before his businesses return to normal, he said.