GOING to the movies on 42nd Street and Broadway used to be a glamorous event. But the pervasive odour of chemical-covered popcorn, the dried up puddles of sticky soda and, of course, the chatter of a thousand strangers have all but ruined the quintessential Saturday night out in New York.
It is no wonder, then, that today and tomorrow the US box office is expected to experience its 18th-consecutive weekend of declining revenue — the longest slump in 20 years.
But Hamid Hashemi, the chief executive of a company called Muvico, has plans to transform America’s cinemas into luxury palaces of film, with service and seating to match.
He has a dozen giant theatres, mainly in Florida, where movie-goers are offered five-star services such as valet parking, a 350-seater cocktail bar, a full service “white table cloth” restaurant and even an on-site child minder.
Then there are the seats. At 73 inches wide — they are designed for two but can be occupied by one — Muvico’s “love seats” are as big as three average American cinema seats.
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“You can have a five-star meal in the restaurant and then many people take a bottle of wine or their desert and coffee into the theatre to watch the movie,” Mr Hashemi says.
Mr Hashemi, an Iranian who fled to America at the age of 19 to escape the revolution, has proved that his luxury formula is a success. His box office take is up two per cent on last year, while the rest of the industry is down by seven per cent. “Every movie theatre gets the same 35 millimetre can of film. It’s what you do with it,” he says.
Mr Hashemi is building America’s biggest cinema at the giant Xanadu shopping mall in New Jersey. It will contain 6,500 of those big comfortable seats while the restaurant will have a view of the Manhattan skyline across the river. The cinema roof will be retractable with a giant outdoor screen in an effort to revive the style of the old drive-in theatres.
“We will design it like a park and there will be helicopter pads for the premieres, which we expect to lure away from Manhattan with the quality of our theatre,” Mr Hashemi adds.
He is looking at sites in New York for a smaller luxury cinema and has been in talks with a property company in London about building a Muvico cinema on the Battersea Power Station site, although he admits international expansion is some way off.
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AMC and Loews, America’s number two and three cinema companies, merged last week. The move was a corporate response to the problem of declining revenue.
They will cut out some overheads, close down overlapping theatres and get rid of unneeded staff, to offset declining sales and keep profits up by reducing costs. But that may not be enough to reverse the malaise.
Paul Degarabedian, the president of Exhibitor Relations, America’s leading box-office data company, believes that the mainstream cinema companies have to follow Mr Hashemi’s lead. “People expect so much more these days when they go out. You cannot get away with poor service and dirty theatres,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mr Hashemi cannot understand why his formula is considered so revolutionary. “When you go out to a restaurant you expect a meal that is better prepared and better served than you get on the kitchen table,” he said. “The same should be true for the movies.”