Action at the Cinema

This is today’s edited post- I wrote a much more anodyne version yesterday, before I read the detail of the Ritzy Cinema workers battle with their owners, mega cinema chain Cineworld…..

The other night I went to our local Odeon to see the excellent A Much Wanted Man.

Great film. Abominable venue. Beat your way past over priced( and how!) frozen yoghurt. Get into an empty cinema which is cold , with dodgy sound and crunchy things on the floor from previous customers. At the other Odeon nearby mice have been seen.

And so on. The Odeon cinema chain is the largest in Britain. It owns European cinemas too. Seven years ago it was bought by Terra Firma, a private equity company run by Guy Hands , the man in charge when EMI bombed. The other big chains are Vue and Cineworld, both of which do better than Odeon at getting customers in. This is probably because they invest in their cinemas and until now the Odeon chain has not. In fact Guy Hands has tried twice to sell the chain and didn’t get the price he wanted.

So far, so private equity. Buy a business, starve it of investment, shove debt onto it, make a killing. That’s how the story usually goes. Its not quite that simple. The Vue chain is owned by private equity and it does invest in its cinemas- though if the experience in some of their cinemas is not rock bottom( see Odeons) it can sometimes be not far off. And now the Odeon, where we all saw our first movie, went on our first date …is about to see a packet of money poured into it after 7 years of having a For Sale sign round it. The Leicester Square venue is being done up next year and so are others. Our Odeon experience is going to be better, they say. (Some screens though will be sold off).

The point about this brief foray into the Odeon chain is that the cinema world shows that we’re not yet in the final stages of helpless neoliberalism –bought and sold by finance companies with no interest in our needs, history, habits or pleasures. The cinema customer punishes those companies which treat her with contempt- the Odeon chain up to now, and rewards those which put in even minimal investment. Cineworld and Vue are both profitable.

But the really interesting development has been in the rise of cinemas which are a real pleasure to be in. Inevitably referred to as ‘boutique’ cinemas these small cinemas have increased in number over the past decade by 13 percent and  are still growing. The Everyman chain has just opened up in Leeds. Corby is about to get a new,smaller scale cinema. The Curzon group is expanding. The East End of London hosts a number of lively small cinemas.

You’ll notice that these small cinemas sweat the asset like crazy. They work very hard, the profits aren’t huge, the risks are high.(What if there isn’t a blockbuster or even a couple of decent middle of the road movies coming along?)  But they believe in what they’re doing, we customers still want to go to attractive cinemas with welcome written on the door. There’s something, still, about a local cinema.

And then- in the manner of Tesco and Sainsbury when they realised that people still like local- the big chains came calling. Cineworld bought the Picturehouse group of small cinemas two years ago. They are now in a huge fight with employees at the Ritzy in Brixton, South London, over the call to pay staff the London living wage of £8.80 an hour. The latest reaction of Cineworld is to offer the living wage, alongside 20 redundancies. This bullying has enraged the staff further.

Cineworld is clearly being damaged reputationally. Does it mean that big chains- whether they are of cinemas, supermarkets, care homes, sports providers- just don’t get what we like and want? Possibly. But in cinema they have not won yet and clearly the Picturehouse staff will win, possibly by the group returning to small scale ownership.

Remember the death of cinema being predicted? Only multiplexes would survive. It isn’t so -cinema is part of our lives and so far we’re hanging onto it. The way we watch films – the way we’ve always  watched them, is partially defeating those so- called economic imperatives which are called in to attack pretty much every area of our lives.

So sometimes, if we just hang on in there, we can keep what’s precious to us.In the meantime, support the Ritzy workers by going to @picturehouses. Hear that lion roar!