With chick flicks you sell more wine, with action movies you sell more beer, and with documentaries you sell less of everything.” — Ky Boyd, director of Rialto Cinemas
in your auditorium. We show them up to 10 minutes of previews before a show starts, and hopefully there are some trailers in that 10 minutes that will make them want to see those upcoming films.” Boyd’s company, he adds, is “financially conservative and risk-averse. We are a capital-intensive, low-margin business.”
revenue over each of the past four years that it would have typically spent on new technology. “This is a tech-intensive business and we have to continually upgrade our projection and sound systems, the seating and so forth. We have to keep the business fresh and at the forefront of our guests’ minds. We’ve done less upgrading than we’d like to, so we anticipate heavy expenditures in upgrading over the next few years.” He says several new IMAX screens are being installed
Focus on technology The CEO of Cinema West, Dave Corkill, says his theaters are experiencing higher attendance in the North Bay because of other local theaters closing. In addition to Summerfield, two San Rafael theaters—Cinemark’s Century Northgate and Century Regency—have also closed since the pandemic. “Those closings have boosted our attendance figures. We can’t really attribute the increases to the film product itself. There are just fewer venues now in the North Bay.” Cinema West operates 15 movie theaters in California and three in Idaho, for a total of 188 screens. In the North Bay, the company runs Boulevard Cinemas in Petaluma, Fairfax Theatre in Fairfax and Larkspur Landing Cinema in Larkspur. Overall, Corkill says, his company has seen an increase of about 15% over where it was last year at the same time. “We believe that’s because of a better flow of movies,” Corkill says. “We had a really fantastic end to last year, it was very encouraging, and it looks to me like we’ll have a very strong spring and going into fall.” Corkill says Cinema West lost a lot of
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David Corkill is CEO of Cinema West.
April 2025
NorthBaybiz 33
PB NorthBaybiz
November 2024
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