Developers, Cities Bank on Boom in Movie Theaters : Business: Planners hope to anchor shopping centers and downtown projects with crowd-drawing multiplexes.
Nizar Patel understands the economic might of a movie theater.
Five years ago, business was slow at the Shakey’s Pizza restaurant Patel runs in Simi Valley’s Mountain Gate Plaza. Then Edwards Theatres opened a seven-screen multiplex in the plaza. Moviegoers poured into Patel’s restaurant before and after films.
The boom did not last. Soon, a larger Edwards multiplex opened in an adjacent shopping center and started getting all the best first-run features. The theater next to Patel’s restaurant seemed to get the older movies, ones that had been on the market for months, he said. His business dried up.
“So now my profit is zip,” Patel said. “I’m back to the same business that I was doing five years ago.”
Patel knows firsthand a simple truth behind the surge of new theater projects planned throughout the county: People like going to the movies. They do it often and in great numbers, enough to drive up the sales of nearby businesses.
Developers and civic planners throughout the county are banking on this truth, using multiplexes to anchor their plans for new shopping centers and downtown redevelopment projects. Movie theaters, they say, are the best way to bring masses of people into an area and boost sales in the nearby shops. And by giving people something to do close to home, the projects can help build communities.
“Now our children, our families, don’t have to leave the community to entertain themselves,” said Mike Morgan, mayor of Camarillo, where two multiplexes have opened in the past year. “We’re proud of our theaters. We’re glad they’re there.”
But with so many theaters proposed in Ventura County, at least six in Thousand Oaks alone, planners would do well to consider the flip side of Patel’s experience--that competition between theaters can have serious consequences. In fact, competition may keep some of the projects now on the drawing board from ever being built.
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The theater construction boom has brought 30 new screens to the county in the past year, and it isn’t over. Moorpark has a new eight-screen multiplex planned. In Thousand Oaks, developers have proposed theater complexes literally from one end of the city to the other--one just inside the county line at Thousand Oaks and Westlake boulevards, another next to the Civic Arts Plaza, still another near the Ventura Freeway at Wendy Drive.
While much of the local theater boom is purely private--real estate developers with shopping plazas to anchor--some of it is driven by the cities themselves. Officials in Ventura and Thousand Oaks want to lure theater operators, and theater patrons, into their downtowns.
In other Southern California cities, they say, movie theaters have helped struggling urban centers flourish again.
“Every redevelopment agency that we went through--Santa Monica, Burbank--all of them have a multiscreen theater complex as part of the redevelopment,” said Gregory Carson, a Ventura city councilman.
“You can create an ambience, you can have restaurants, but you still need a destination to bring people,” he said. “And movie theaters are considered a destination.”
Redevelopment Tool
Years ago, Paul Rosenstein rarely visited Santa Monica’s Third Street shopping area.
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“It was a typical example of a rundown area that was not well-used, with stores selling inexpensive items, somewhat crime-ridden,” said Rosenstein, now the city’s mayor.
Santa Monica officials had been trying to revive the street since the mid-1960s, converting it to a pedestrian mall ringed by parking garages. But in the early 1970s the Santa Monica Place mall opened at the intersection of Third Street and Broadway. Shoppers went straight to the modern, enclosed mall and ignored the stores outside.
When city leaders launched another revitalization effort in 1984, they decided one way to lure people out of the mall and onto the street, past the store windows and restaurants, was to put movie theaters down the street.
“It’s the dynamics of theaters,” said Ron Cano, executive director of the Bayside District Corp., which oversees the Third Street Promenade. “They change feature movies every week, so people find a reason to come down here every weekend.”
The street now has three multiplexes. On a typical weekend day, Cano said, between 10,000 and 12,000 people browse the Third Street Promenade’s stores and eat at the more than 80 restaurants.
Without the theaters, he said, the redevelopment project may have worked, but not as well.
“How many times do you go to a Banana Republic?” he said. “How often do you go to an Urban Outfitters, a local jewelry store? Without the theaters, you wouldn’t have the same day-to-day foot traffic.”
Civic leaders throughout Ventura County envy Santa Monica’s foot traffic and want to replicate it here. In Ventura, plans for a multiplex at the corner of Main and Palm streets are considered crucial to the city’s redevelopment.
Thousand Oaks officials want a multiscreen theater, surrounded by shops and restaurants, to fill the empty lot next to the Civic Arts Plaza, creating a new urban core in the spread-out city.
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And in Fillmore, restoration of the Fillmore Town Theater--an old vaudeville theater converted to a movie house--is the linchpin of the city’s efforts to rebuild its earthquake-damaged downtown.
More than money is involved. For a small community, a theater can be a gathering place, a way residents can relax without leaving town.
Dan Diaz remembers watching Disney movies in the darkness of Santa Paula’s old Fox theater as a child. But the theater and the city’s drive-in were torn down years ago, and city residents had to drive to Ventura or farther for films.
Then in April, Wallace Theaters opened a seven-screen multiplex on Main Street. The result: More people are staying in town or coming in from the countryside, said Diaz, president of the Santa Paula Area Chamber of Commerce. He sees the increase at his family’s restaurant, because people eat before and after films.
The theater, he said, strengthens Santa Paula.
“The more we have to offer in our town, the more self-sufficient we become, the stronger we are,” he said. “It’s one more step to improving Santa Paula. It’s something that we needed for the children in the community.”
Investors Wary
But wanting new theaters as building blocks for development doesn’t necessarily mean getting them.
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Ventura may be eager for a multiplex on Main Street, but theater owners are not, at least not yet. In September, the AMC theater chain pulled out of the downtown Ventura project, citing a possible glut of screens in the market.
Developer Victor Georgino said he has talked with other chains--including Century Theatres, which owns an eight-screen multiplex off Johnson Drive--but so far, no one has taken AMC’s place.
Downtown Ventura may be too far west in the county to attract a chain, said Ben Littlefield, chief operating officer for Mann Theatres. Whereas Camarillo’s new multiplexes can draw people from most any city in the county, Ventura’s downtown lies well west of much of the county’s population and current screens.
“I’d like to be interested, but the risk is huge,” Littlefield said. “It’s too far on the fringe of the market.”
Georgino said he has heard that complaint from theater owners. But while he has scaled back his plans, now aiming for 12 screens instead of 16 or 20, he remains convinced that a Main Street multiplex would work, attracting people from Ojai and the coast between Ventura and Santa Barbara.
“I still think that with the amount of money and the investment the City Council has put into downtown Ventura, downtown Ventura can be a destination location, and it will draw from a much larger area than it currently does. . . . Downtown Ventura has a lot to offer.”
The eastern end of the county has no problem attracting theater chains, especially along the Ventura Freeway corridor. In fact, chains are now competing to be the first to build their multiplexes, in hopes of gaining the clout needed to pull in the top-drawing movies.
Littlefield from Mann Theatres said the county has been under-screened for years. His company plans to blanket the Conejo Valley with a new multiplex at the corner of Thousand Oaks and Westlake boulevards, as well as adding more screens at their current Janss Marketplace and Agoura Hills locations.
“We’ve built facilities that are physically excellent,” Littlefield boasted. “And for someone to come into such an upscale market and compete against that, they’re going to have to make a substantial investment.
Mann’s competition includes Edwards Theatres, which opened a massive movie “palace” in Camarillo last December. Pending city approval, Edwards hopes to build a 12-screen theater, with adjacent shops, at Hodencamp Road and Thousand Oaks Boulevard in Thousand Oaks.
The theaters will compete not just for bodies, but films. Film companies look at a theater’s grossing history, as well as its equipment and condition, to decide which theater can bring them the biggest return on their first-run movies.
That has prompted competition to get theaters built first.
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Neal Scribner, the architect working on Edwards’ Hodencamp Road theater, has accused Thousand Oaks City Manager Grant Brimhall of stalling a public hearing on his project. The theater site is barely a mile away from the Civic Arts Plaza’s so-called private side, where the city wants to see a multiplex.
“I’m not necessarily against anything on the private side, but I don’t think they should be manipulating the process to give themselves an advantage,” Scribner said.
Brimhall denies any effort to stall the project, which is tentatively scheduled to go before the city’s Planning Commission later this month. The prospect that Thousand Oaks may soon be glutted with theaters worries Mayor Jaime Zukowski. If the private-side theater went under due to intense competition, it could leave behind an empty building next door to City Hall.
“I do feel that theaters will be overbuilt, and they’re not easily convertible to other uses,” she said.
There is no guarantee that all of the theaters planned will be built. Four of the six projects proposed in Thousand Oaks have yet to clear the Planning Commission. Scribner believes that if his project wins approval, potential competitors may have to reconsider their plans.
“Everybody is trying to preempt everyone else, because the first person there with a major chain is going to be the one with clout with the distributors,” said Allan D. Kotin, a consultant who studied the economic impact of one of the projects.
“What you have, probably, is more theaters announced than are going to be built,” he said.
