Are credits rolling for vintage, long-running River Oaks Theater?
No deal on lease for movie chain, owner of shopping center
The next 30 days could make or break Houston’s River Oaks Theater.
The lease between Los Angeles-based Landmark Theatres, an art house cinema chain that includes the River Oaks Theater, and Weingarten Realty, which owns and operates the River Oaks Shopping Center, expires at the end of March.
So far, they’ve been unable to reach an agreement. Landmark Theatres president and chief operating officer Paul Serwitz says negotiations — which first began in spring 2020 — have stalled.
“Those discussions date back to last April or May in an effort to find a solution,” he said Thursday. “We’ve been open to a variety of ways to solve it, by going month to month until the market and theatrical business normalizes, or creating something to the benefit of the landlord to protect them by way of (an) extension.”
Serwitz adds that long-term extensions — extending the terms of the current lease — are both common and wildly varying within the industry. They can run anywhere from two to 15 years.
Via e-mail, a spokesperson for Weingarten Realty said Silver Cinema Acquisition Co. (which operates as Landmark Theatres) “has been a key component to River Oaks Shopping Center. We have continued to work with the company who has not paid rent since March of 2020. Conversations have indicated that their
business model does not support paying more than a fraction of the previous rent going forward. Unfortunately, the pandemic has caused many businesses in the entertainment industry, such as theaters, to fail.”
As Houston’s last remaining vintage movie theater, River Oaks Theater has held court on West Gray since 1939. After Landmark Theatres was founded in 1974, the River Oaks became one of its first acquisitions just two years later, in 1976.
The well-known institution, with its black-andwhite exterior and red marquee, has been in jeopardy before. In July 2006, the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance declared that three Art Deco buildings owned by Weingarten Realty were “endangered”: the River Oaks Theater, River Oaks Shopping Center and the Alabama Theatre, which is now a Trader Joe’s grocery store.
That year, more than 23,000 people signed an online petition to spare the buildings. And philanthropist Carolyn Farb helped organize a “Save Our Shrines” protest on the street in front of the River Oaks Theater.
But the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been a formidable opponent. Many movie theaters are losing the battle.
“You’d be pressed to find an industry that’s been hit harder by the pandemic,” Serwitz said. “A lot of theaters have gone dark or filed Chapter 11. We’re trying to avoid those dire circumstances.”
State mandates allowed Texas cinemas to reopen earlier than most. The River Oaks Theater was closed just shy of six months, from March 16 through Sept. 9.
“With the closure, we had no business to operate. There was no other revenue stream,” Serwitz said. “Our whole company was shut down, we closed the corporate office and everyone was furloughed. There was no capital to pay rent.”
Even since reopening last fall, he describes business as “extremely poor and not sustainable” across the board, from megascreen chains such as AMC Theatres and Cinemark Theatres (which have reopened) to Regal Cinemas (which reopened and then temporarily closed again) and smaller operations that show independent, foreign language and art house films, like the River Oaks.
The coronavirus has created a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma for the movie industry: People aren’t buying tickets because there’s little new content that isn’t available via streaming services, and studios are releasing less new content in theaters because people aren’t going to the movies.
“Hopefully we’ll see an uptick with the vaccinations rolling out and COVID numbers declining, barring any regressions like we saw last year in the fall,” Serwitz said.
That’s the other big obstacle — the target keeps moving. Even after Landmark Theatres has engaged with its landlord to find a solution, a proposal often becomes moot as big movie openings are delayed.
Serwitz stressed that the company is open to any resolution that could work for both parties. Even if that means renovating the River Oaks Theater along with the rest of the River Oaks Shopping Center, which is currently undergoing a multimillion-dollar facelift.
“We understand that real estate companies have businesses to run as well,” he said. “But we desperately want to stay.”