LITTLE ROCK — By all accounts, 2012 was a record year for domestic movie ticket sales, which hit or may have even topped $11 billion, depending on your source.

But in central Arkansas, the movie market is stretched surprisingly thin, with too many screens chasing too few movies.

“Pulaski County is massively over screened,” says Matt Smith, who owns west Little Rock’s five-screen Market Street Cinema, the area’s only “art house,” and is an intense inside observer of the area’s movie-theater competition.

“We’ve got 25 screens too many.”

The competition is particularly tight in North Little Rock’s McCain Boulevard U.S. 67/167 corridor, where three cineplexes with a total of 30 screens are nearly within spitting distance of one another.

Twenty of those screens are “first run,” meaning they’re showing movies that have come out within the last several weeks. That’s the long-standing Lakewood 8 theater in Lakewood Village, which very recently changed owners again, and the still nearly brand-new, practically next-door Regal McCain Mall Stadium 12.

The other 10 screens belong to the Tandy 10, across U.S. 67/167 from McCain Mall in the McCain Plaza shopping center. It’s a “second-run” or “discount” house - some folks call it a “dollar theater,” though almost all tickets cost more than $1 nowadays. The films it shows have already appeared for one or more weeks at area “first-run” theaters, with a very occasional flick that has not actually previously appeared on local screens but hasn’t yet gone to home video release.

The Lakewood 8 has changed hands several times since United Artists opened it as a then-state-of-the-art facility in the 1980s. Dallas-based Starplex Cinemas just bought it, along with nine other theaters with a total of 92 screens in Midwest and Southern states, from Overland Park, Kan.-based Show Plex Cinemas.

Starplex, in a recent news release, announced that the recent acquisition would “create a top-12 theater chain” with 32 locations and a total of 320 screens in Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington.

Traci Hoey, Starplex’s director of marketing, says the company is considering converting the North Little Rock eight screen to an all-digital projection system and “renovating the seats to luxury spacious leather recliner chairs,” as it has in theaters currently under its umbrella.

The theater’s lease comes due later this year, and “both options will factor into our negotiations,” she notes. She says she does not yet have specific figures for what renovations would cost or whether there might be any changes in the theater’s ticket prices.

OPEN, CLOSING OPTIONS

Hoey did not, however, in any way promise that Starplex will actually negotiate a new lease, make any of those changes or indeed, keep the theater open.

Starplex has these options available:

It can make the sizable investments to upgrade the theater and keep it operating as a first-run house and continue in direct competition with the McCain Mall 12.

It can convert the theater to a “discount house,” either as a second-run theater or a hybrid of some kind. (The presence of a “discount house” only a few blocks away likely takes this option off the table, Hoey concedes. “We don’t have any plans to make it a discount theater.”)

It can convert the theater into an “art house,” which would primarily show independent, documentary and foreign with-subtitles films. (That’s probably not the smartest possible business decision, considering that Smith says his Market Street Cinema, in more art film-friendly west Little Rock, is barely keeping its doors open.)

It can close the theater.

Smith says Showplex had been paying Lakewood Village landlords $32,000 in monthly rent, “plus a common area and maintenance fee. It’s costing them $35,000 a month to be there.”

Still, it was the only place north of the river and south of Searcy to see first-run films until the McCain Mall 12 opened in September, with state-of-the-art projection and sound systems and rocker seats in stadium-seating tiers with high-backed headrests and cup-holder armrests that lift up for easier access.

“McCain Mall is doing very well for us,” says Christine White, the Southern marketing manager for Knoxville, Tenn.-based Regal Entertainment, which also operates the Breckenridge Stadium 12 in west Little Rock. “It’s a beautiful location.” White says company policy prohibits her from giving out hard numbers.

One of the new theater’s selling points is its enhanced technology “RPX” (Regal Premium Experience) auditorium. “RPX presents movies the way filmmakers intended, with powerful, uncompressed surround sound and bright eye-popping images in 2D and 3D,” according to a Regal news release.

It’s designed to compete, at least in part, with the pinnacle of theatrical technology, Imax. According to its website, Imax.com, it’s a “proprietary [combination of] software, architecture and equipment” that enhances the movie going experience. The only true Imax theater in the state is at the Dickinson Chenal 9 in west Little Rock. Southwest Little Rock’s Rave Colonel Glenn 18 has what it calls its “Extreme” screen, also an Imax competitor.

For the moment, at least, White says, the movie studios regard North Little Rock as a “split zone,” and are dividing first-run films between the two theaters.

But Smith says it’s obvious that the glossy new theater is getting the best of the split. The Lakewood 8 has been getting what Smith characterizes as lighter-weight, less salable films, such as The Man With Iron Fists, Playing for Keeps, Killing Them Softly and The Guilt Trip, while McCain Mall 12 has been picking up the blockbusters - Red Dawn, The Hobbit, Les Miserables and Django Unchained.

And the Lakewood 8, to fill its screens, has also been picking up movies “that the 12-screen has already played and let go. I’m talking about first-run product.”

A spokesman for Dallas based Cinemark, which operates the Tandy 10, says the company does not consider it is competing with the Lakewood 8 and McCain Mall 12: “Both of those are first-run theaters; Tandy 10 is a discount house. We cannot open movies there until they have finished playing at the first run theaters.

“Because our ticket prices are only $1 to $2 it would not be a fair comparison to the first-run theaters that charge $8 to $10 a ticket. They are apples and oranges when it comes to box office gross and attendance.”

54 ‘SOUTHERN’ SCREENS

On the Little Rock side of the river there are 54 screens - 12 at the Breckenridge Stadium 12 and 9 at the Chenal 9, including the Imax, in west and far west Little Rock, respectively; 18 at the Colonel Glenn 18 in southwest Little Rock; 10 at the Riverdale 10 in Riverdale; and five at the Market Street Cinema. With the exception of the art house, each of those theaters is considered to be in its own zone, so all of them could be, and usually are, simultaneously playing pretty much the same slate of films.

Also considered part of this market: the 14 screens at the Tinseltown in Benton and another 14 screens at the Conway Towne Centre, both operated by Cinemark.

The Riverdale 10, the Lakewood 8 and the Market Street Cinema have not yet converted to all-digital, which is important because eventually the major studios are expected to phase out film altogether as a medium.

Meanwhile, the ownership of the Colonel Glenn 18 is in flux. Dallas-based Rave Motion Pictures is in the process of selling off all but three of its movie complexes:

16 in Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Texas to Carmike Cinemas

10 - two in Louisiana, two in Ohio, one each in Alabama, North Carolina, Nevada, Nebraska and California and Florida - to AMC Theatres

32 locations in other Southern and Midwestern states, presumably including the Colonel Glenn 18 in Little Rock, to Cinemark. The sale is reportedly subject to antitrust approval.

Smith says it’s a good deal for Cinemark, whose Tinseltown in Benton “has been horribly beaten up by the Rave, and so has the [theater] at Breckenridge.” (White says that the Breckenridge 12-screen has also been doing “very well.”)

Smith says only three theaters in the market have been consistently busy: the Colonel Glenn 18, the McCain Mall 12 and the Conway Towne Centre.

“Riverdale did $300 on The Hobbit on [the first Friday of its release],” Smith says. “It was the lowest gross in the state of Arkansas.”

The Riverdale 10, which has expanded its food offerings to include fried chicken, frog legs and catfish, now opens and starts showing movies at 9 a.m., presumably to give it a competitive edge. But apparently it’s not attracting moviegoers at that hour. Smith says he dropped in for an early-morning showing of Playing for Keeps, and he and two employees were the only people in the building before noon.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST

There’s a similar situation in Northwest Arkansas: more available screens than movies to play on them.

There are 16 screens each at the Malco Razorback 16 and the AMC Fiesta Square 16 in Fayetteville; in Rogers, 12 each at the Rogers Towne Center and the newer Pinnacle Hills, both operated by Malco. Malco also operates a nine-screen second-run theater, the Sunset Cinema 9, in Springdale.

Carmike operates the 10-screen Sugar Creek 10 in Bella Vista; an independent company programs six screens in Siloam Springs. And the 112 Drive-In in Fayetteville has one screen that shows a double-feature, sometimes first run, sometimes second-run, on weekends in the warmer months, March-October.

At all the area’s first-run theaters, some movies hang on long after attendance has fallen below profitable levels because there are not enough new movies to take their places.

Style, Pages 27 on 01/15/2013