May 18, 2007 Friday
By STEPHANIE EARLS Staff Writer

There's no arguing that Americans love, love, love the movies. But do we still love our movie theaters?

You remember them: Air cool and still; the luscious smell of butter-bathed popcorn; the anticipation as the lights dim. Or maybe you never leave your living room.

In the Capital Region and throughout the country, the answer is hazy. In 2006, U.S. box offices took in almost $9.5 billion - a nice sum, but it came at the end of a nerve-wracking three-year slump. And in our region, more than 20 movie screens have gone dark since 2001. Nevertheless, investors are spending millions on two new state-of-the-art cinemas, and banking that posh surroundings will help to lure the celluloid set away from their home theaters. Movieland, an elegant new six-screen cinema at State and Broadway in Schenectady, opened Thursday night with evening showings of first-run fare, including this weekend's likely blockbuster, "Shrek The Third." The theater features wood-and-leather stadium seats, piped-in classy jazz while you wait, a cafe serving beer and wine, and a vow to never, ever show on-screen ads.

"Our mission is to bring style and elegance back to the movies," said Charles Moss of Bow Tie Partners, the New York City-based firm that owns the theater. "We want to make it an experience like it was generations back. We internally call ourselves `the anti-mall.' "

Meanwhile, back at the mall: Colonie Center has embarked on a $75 million expansion project that includes a new 13-screen cinema slated to open in November. The new movie house - which will be designed with Adirondack flourishes - will be the latest addition to the holdings of Regal Entertainment Group, the region's dominant exhibitor.

Feldman Mall Properties Inc., which bought Colonie Center in February 2005, looked at studies that showed that, in order to stay vital, the mall needed to refashion itself as a "lifestyle entertainment center," said mall manager Joe Millett. "Basically that meant theaters. So (customers) are able to come in, have a meal and shop, and at the same time go to the theater."

But when it comes to theaters, the Capital Region is good at making new friends; not so great at keeping the old.

The past six years has seen the demise of several older theaters, including Cine 10 at the former Northway Mall in Colonie and Regal's older Crossgates property, the Cinema 12. The Madison Theater in Albany, one of the area's oldest cinemas, closed and then reopened under a new owner.

Investors say they're not worried about overbuilding.

"A lot of the (analysts) who looked in the market here consider it underscreened," said Ray Gillen, chairman of Schenectady's Metroplex Development Authority, which approved and backed Movieland as part of a massive downtown revitalization project.

"There are only seven screens in our county," Gillen said. "The whole region is seen as not having enough quality product."

Theaters that don't constantly update to offer the newest trends can have a relatively short life span, said Patrick Corcoran, director of media and research for the National Association of Theater Owners. "In the mid- to late '90s, a lot of theaters began putting in stadium-style seating. It caught on so quickly that a lot of people stopped going to older theaters that didn't have it."

But regardless of how the seats are arranged, the forces shaping movie exhibition don't end at the fire exits. Like every other form of media, the business is moving toward more personal, digital, portable and on-demand access to all things viewable. Even apartment dwellers have home theaters. Movie ticket prices creep past $10 as DVD prices drop, while the window separating a blockbuster opening and a DVD release can be as brief as three months.

"In general, theater owners do not want (the DVD release window) to shrink any further, and have expressed opposition publicly to simultaneous release," Corcoran said. But there's symbiosis there, as well, he added: "One of the things that the growth of DVDs has done is to make people more interested in movies."

According to author and professor Wheeler Winston Dixon, movie theaters won't be riding into the sunset anytime soon.

"I think there will always be a place for movie theaters, because people want that public connection. They want that experience of going to a movie and experiencing it with other people," said Dixon, a professor of film studies at the University of Nebraska and the author of numerous books about film and the future of the industry. "Theaters can offer an enormous picture, crushing waves of sound and the sense of spectacle."

Those are the items high on the wish list of audience members like T'Asia Thomas-Earle, who hopped off the Broadway bus when she saw the crowd gathered inside the lobby of Movieland for its grand opening Thursday morning.

As the 21-year-old toured the new theater, she munched free popcorn and marveled at the long, carpeted hallway, the tiled corridors leading to the restrooms, the trash cans gleaming like obsidian, and the fancy seats that smelled like a new car.

"I am so coming here," she said.

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