Secrets
of Size
In terms of seat counts, cinema auditoria
are a fraction the size they used to be — but there
are signs that the trend toward small might
be reversing.
by Anne Gilbert
They
weren’t called “palaces” for nothing. The
average American cinema auditorium used to be a lot bigger. (Click
image to enlarge)
In their 2004 book “Cinema Treasures,” Ross Melnick
and Andreas Fuchs lay out a clear chronology of the birth
and heyday of the largest.
The first “palace” said to have been built exclusively
for movies was New York’s Regent, a 2,000-seat Harlem
venue completed in 1913. It was not destined to remain the
city’s biggest for long – the next year, Manhattan’s
Strand opened near Times Square, and boasted 3,500 seats.
Soon after, grand-scale theatres began popping up across
the country, but the Big Apple still hosted the largest and
most elaborate. In 1919, a few blocks from the Strand, the
Capitol opened and raised the bar much higher with a capacity
of 5,300. In 1926, its record was eclipsed by New York’s
Roxy, which offered 5,920 seats.
The largest
cinema auditorium of all time, according to, among other
sources, the Guinness Book of World Records,
was the 5,960-seat Radio City Music Hall. It began life
as a legitimate theatre in December 1932 but, thanks
to dismal
Depression-era ticket sales, was repurposed as a full-time
cinema just two months later.*
Were the Music
Hall still serving as a moviehouse on a full-time basis,
it would manifest by far the nation’s largest
cinema auditorium — but that site essentially
ended its movie career in 1978, and today serves primarily
as a venue for concerts and other live events.
Radio City
Music Hall is unusual also in that it is one of the few
supersized cinemas of yore that survives largely
intact. Harlem’s Regent, which currently serves
as a church, is another.
Active single-screen
cinemas of any size are increasingly rare, as many former
singles have been re-appropriated
as stores or temples or for other uses, razed completely
or
remodeled into multis with smaller auditoria.
If an unsplit
venue from the palace era is still exhibiting movies,
chances are it’s now one of the world’s
largest active cinema auditoria.
AMC’s Loews Uptown 1 in Washington, D.C., for example,
was built in 1933 and comes in at 850 seats. Hollywood’s
El Capitan, built in 1926, boasts 1,000 seats.
For the
title of America’s largest active cinema auditorium,
there appears to be, rather improbably, a tie.
Situated across the street from the El Capitan
is the world-famous Grauman’s Chinese
Theatre, built in 1927 and possessed of seating
for 1,162.
New York’s
Ziegfeld, operated today by Clearview Cinemas, opened
in 1969 as one of the last U.S. movie palaces and
claims the exact same seat count as the Chinese:
1,162.
This magazine
discovered no greater seat count for an active U.S. cinema
auditorium.
DIVIDE AND
CONQUER
Seat-counts per site tell their own story.
Muvico Theatres’ soon-to-launch Xanadu megaplex in
New Jersey’s Meadowlands, just four miles west of Manhattan,
is expected to contain 500 more seats than Radio City Music
Hall – but the Xanadu will spread its 6,500 seats over
26 auditoria.
The difference between the two facilities’ utilization
of the same number of seats is emblematic of how the exhibition
industry has evolved generally over the last seven or eight
decades. The average number of auditoria per site has been
going up every year for decades, and cinema sites today average
more than six screens, an all-time record.
Experts say exhibitors today struggle not
only with the question of how big to build a multi’s largest auditoria, but
also how many “big ones” to build.
The answers are tied to the increasing speed
with which movie titles fly off multiplex marquees
“Movies are lessening their gross week-to-week
more and more,” explains
Dan Harkins, CEO of Arizona-based Harkins Theatres. “They
are more front-heavy, so it’s important to have enough
large auditoriums so that a picture can launch and play simultaneously,
and smaller ones to move it into after a couple of weeks.”
This “front loading,” combined
with the sheer volume of titles rolling into cinemas each
year, make it
more efficient for contemporary exhibitors to have, say,
five auditoria that each hold more than 250 seats, rather
than three auditoria seating 400 each. The overall seat counts
are nearly the same, but the former option allows an operator
more flexibility. It also means generally fewer empty seats.
Still, no universal formula exists. “Each theatre operator
is different, actually, but it’s determined by what
they think they are going to need in terms of being able
to get and keep film product,” says Michael Browers,
a principal at Behr-Browers Architects Inc.
Browers has been designing theatres since
1989 and works with Mann Theatres, Regal Entertainment Group,
Galaxy Theatres
and Brenden Theatres, among others. He cites the competition
in the market as another contributing factor in deciding
on the ideal mix for a new multiplex: “It’s frequently
based on the film buyer, what they think they’re going
to need to put themselves in the best position to buy films.”
“The mix is also driven by the type of
exhibition planned for the specific location – is it
specialty art-house fare, mainstream, crossover?” adds
Tom Rael, principal for PleskowRael Architecture(s), and
David Kim, an associate
with the firm, who responded to our queries via tandem e-mail.
The Marina del Rey, Calif., company designs for, among others,
Landmark Theatres.
The specific mix of auditorium sizes, according
to architect Bill Brunner, “is one of those areas in theatre design
that’s being experimented on a lot, and it really gets
down to a personal decision by the theatre company.” Brunner
is a vice president of Paradigm Designs, a Michigan firm
that designs sites for numerous Midwestern circuits such
as MJR Theatres, Goodrich Quality Theatres, Coming Attractions
and Marquee Cinemas. “There is really no right or wrong
formula.”
Nonetheless, patterns do emerge. As a rough
guideline, Browers says, medium-sized auditoria account for
approximately 50
to 60 percent of the total breakdown for most of the sites
he works with. The remaining theatres are divided evenly
between smaller and larger rooms.
Dean Kerasotes, executive vice president and
COO of the Chicago-based Kerasotes Theatres chain, identifies
his circuit’s
ideal breakdown to be very similar to the one outlined by
Browers: two to four auditoria of the largest capacity, in
the neighborhood of 375 to 500 seats each; two to four containing
about 300 seats; six auditoria with 150 to 200 seats; and
two to four with about 100 seats.
Paradigm Designs’ Brunner notes that
the mix changes depending on the overall size of the multiplex.
New complexes
containing eight to 12 auditoria tend to have two large auditoria. “In
a larger multiplex, with something like 16 screens, they
will try to have at least four,” he says.
Harkins says his “dream 20-plex” is one that
favors large auditoria. An actual Harkins site is influenced
by land availability and competition, among other factors,
but if the circuit has its druthers, he says, “we try
to go for six theatres to be the large ones – 500-seaters,
and then another six at around 350, four at about 250 and
the last four would be about 150. That would be the kind
of ratio we would strive for.”
WHAT IS ‘BIG’?
There are also differing opinions on what
constitutes the best size for a “large auditorium.” From multi
to multi, “the biggest” can vary by hundreds
of seats.
Brunner works with many circuits, independent
operators and first-time exhibitors who are building smaller
sites,
so
300-seat auditoria represent an upper threshold for many
of his clients’ plexes. “When you go over 300
seats, a lot of buildings that size will have an elevator
and an upper lobby,” he explains. “A lot of smaller
multiplexes, with eight to 12 screens, are trying to keep
from putting in an elevator.”
More generally, he characterizes 300 to 450
seats as the average size of the “large” auditoria he sees,
and says the lower end bottoms out at about 70 seats, though,
he notes, “there are many circuits who don’t
want to go below 100.”
Browers cites similar numbers: “450 is an average large
auditorium that we are seeing, but 500 or 550 is the large
end that we’ve seen.” And here again, 100 is
typically the smallest, he says, because “as you get
into the smaller ones, you begin to lose overall efficiency.”
(click image to enlarge) Despite the generous
range allowed by the term “large
auditorium,” most circuits have their largest rooms
at somewhere around 450 seats; Harkins’ are slightly
larger at just over 500, and Kerasotes’ are slightly
smaller, though they are in the process of building what
will be their largest auditorium to date at 550 seats.
“We are seeing more and more people have
a ‘premiere’ auditorium,” notes
Brunner. “It’s not only larger, but it is nicer.” Exhibitors,
he says, “are looking at their bottom line and saying
that they are making most of their money on a few movies,
and want to have a premiere presentation for those movie-release
events.”
Harkins has recently introduced a line of
larger auditoria called Cine Capri. These spaces have a larger
screen, more
space and more than 600 seats each. “We have just one
per market,” Harkins explains. “It is a single
large premiere auditorium that we put in each market – in
what we perceive to be the best-located megaplex that will
attract not just the neighborhood, but the region.”
Regal’s Ontario, Calif., 22-plex, launched in 1997,
houses a 750-plus-seat auditorium dubbed “The Palace.” That
rivals some of the smaller single-screen auditoria built
during the palace era.
As Kerasotes explains it, sometimes sheer
size in itself offers appeal for the patron. “Larger auditoriums are
terrific for the tentpole films,” he says. “People
love the energy generated by the crowd.”
Theatre operators “want to have a premiere presentation for those movie
release events,” says Brunner, “because this is something [they’ve]
got to offer that ‘home theatre’ and DVD cannot offer.”
At least two cinema complexes in Hollywood
have it both ways – by building
new a modern multi right next door to a venerable behemoth. Grauman’s
1,162-seat Chinese is now adjacent to a new sister plex dubbed the Chinese
6. Pacific’s 934-seat Cinerama Dome, built in 1963, now neighbors the
Arclight 14-plex, completed in 2002 on what was part of the older cinema’s
sprawling parking lot.
“I am tending to see larger,” says Browers. “Not more large auditoriums,
but the larger large auditoriums.”
His sentiment is echoed by every circuit and architect contacted for
this article: The number of large auditoria is not rising, but the number
of
seats, and the
square footage, of those large auditoria are.
“Our theatres have been trending to larger
auditoriums, [with] fewer total screens in the facility,” confirms Kerasotes.
“If we can go into a market like Texas
and build a Cine Capri and be the largest in the state,” says Harkins, “I think that shows that Harkins is
leaning towards a larger auditorium.”
CHANGING SEATS,
CHANGING SIZE
“Auditoriums, globally, got bigger – but
they had to,” says
Harkins.
While the exhibition industry’s average seat-per-auditorium
ratio is still considerably smaller than it was before the
TV era, the square-footage-per-auditorium ratio has not shrunk
quite as radically – thanks to audience-pleasing amenities
like stadium-style seating and deeper row depths. “Stadium
seating requires more area to get the same number of seats,” explains
Browers.
Additionally, movie seats themselves have
gotten larger. The average seat used to be about 17 to 20
inches wide, according
to Sam Snell of Dolphin Seating. When stadium seating became
more popular, he says, the seats got wider (taller, too).
Now, circuits are looking at 22-inch-wide seats with retractable
armrests, or going for 23 or 24 inches in width.
“There has been a tendency towards a
higher quality experience,” says
Brunner. “The seats are wider, the row spacing is wider,
so all of these things have made the seat count per square
foot go down. But I’d say it’s worked to the
benefit of the person going to the movies.”
“More exhibitors [are] consciously requesting
us to provide larger, more comfortable seats,” say PleskowRael’s
Rael and Kim. Though this does have an impact on the overall
capacity of the auditorium, they point out that “the
loss of a few seats weighted against a more enriching viewing
experience seems worth it.”
Harkins says that if a modern 600-seat auditorium
were to rip out all of its stadium-style seating and replace
it with
sloped seating – and even if that auditorium maintained
generous row depths and carefully crafted sight lines – “you
could increase the seating by 20 to 25 percent easily.”
But Harkins is quick to emphasize that the
days of all-sloped-seating are in no danger of returning.
Building a new complex without
the space-gobbling stadium-style seating, he says, “is
something that no one would ever do.” 
*While
the New York palaces continued to swell ever larger in pre-war
America, they hardly represented
the typical American moviehouse. In 1921, while the Capitol
ruled the roost with its 5,300 seats, fewer than 10 percent
of the nation’s auditoria housed 1,000 or more seats,
and fewer than 1 percent contained more than 2,000 seats,
according to “Cinema Treasures.”
