Amid a Volatile Industry, Burlington May Lose Its Only Cinema 

When Ryan Reynolds brought his Marvel character Deadpool back to movie theaters last month, the flip, foul-mouthed antihero was all action, rocking to NSYNC and slaying enemies as the opening credits rolled. Deadpool & Wolverine teams Reynolds' "Merc With a Mouth" with Hugh Jackman's brooding Wolverine in an attempt to save Deadpool's universe.

The Disney/Marvel Studios movie blew into theaters July 26 on the tailwind of Twisters and the surprise animated hit Inside Out 2. Hyped as the blockbuster of the summer, Deadpool & Wolverine was counted on to revive lagging 2024 box office revenues, then trailing 2023's year-to-date gross by 17 percent.

By most accounts, it delivered. Grossing $211.4 million its first weekend, the movie had the sixth-biggest domestic opening of all time.

But at Merrill's Roxy Cinemas in downtown Burlington, where Deadpool & Wolverine played on two screens opening night, traffic was light. Lines at the concession counter were short enough that David Nelson's two young kids — there to see Despicable Me 4 — had time for intense deliberations over their choice of candy, incorporating two rounds of "Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe."

At 7 p.m. that Friday, moviegoers scattered among the Roxy's six theaters filled just 80 of the cinema's 660 seats.

"Eighty people should be in just one theater, not six," said Merrill Jarvis III, the third-generation movie mogul whose family owns the Roxy. Marvel's superhuman, time-traveling duo might be able to save a universe — no spoilers here — but they likely can't save the Roxy.

"I hate to say it, but if people don't start going, it's gonna close," Jarvis said.

Shuttering the 43-year-old movie house would reduce the Jarvis dynasty's theaters, which once numbered 13, to a single complex, Majestic 10 in Williston. The state's largest city would be left without a commercial cinema.

The scene playing out at the Roxy epitomizes the difficulties faced nationwide by the historically volatile movie theater business, which continues to reel from the COVID-19 shutdown and last year's writers' and actors' strikes in Hollywood.

Ticket sales have yet to rebound to pre-pandemic levels, and they're not on track to do so this year. COVID-19's one-two punch closed theaters — the Roxy was dark for 18 months — and accelerated the rise of streaming, as movie lovers became more comfortable staying home.

Last year's dual strike threw in an unwelcome plot twist, delaying film productions and releases and silencing stars who otherwise would have been out on the talk-show circuit promoting the movies that had managed to make it to theaters.

Even the theater companies with the deepest pockets are struggling. AMC Entertainment Holdings, the world's biggest movie theater chain, narrowly avoided bankruptcy during the pandemic and restructured its debt in July. No. 2 chain Cineworld has closed about 75 of its 505 U.S. locations after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2022.

In Vermont, where the theaters are independent or belong to local chains, many theater owners remain optimistic and are finding creative ways to survive. Some have upgraded sound systems and seats, while others think outside the popcorn box to supplement ticket sales with cocktails and full restaurant menus, theater rentals, trivia nights, yoga and popcorn catering.

At Essex Cinemas, owner Peter Edelmann, who already presents live performances in his movie theater, plans to sacrifice 500 seats to build an entertainment complex with an arcade and high-tech attractions Topgolf and HyperBowling.

"There's still a viability for movies," Edelmann said. "But you can't rely on the movies to make it a sustainable product on their own."

That's especially true when there are complicating factors beyond the industry-wide pressures. In Burlington, Jarvis wrestles with the challenges of a city rife with homelessness, vandalism and open drug use. He said he has found tents pitched in front of the Roxy and routinely paints over graffiti on the building's exterior.

A few weeks ago, he shelled out $3,000 for glass after vandals broke two of the theater's poster cases and threw a rock through the front door.

The Jarvis family has operated theaters in Burlington since they bought the Flynn in 1972. "I've been in a movie theater downtown every day since," Jarvis said, "and I've never seen it like this."

"Burlington's a zombie land," he said, and he doesn't believe city officials have a plan to fix it.

A thriving cineplex can be a sign of a healthy city, part of its cultural and economic fabric. Movie theaters draw people who visit nearby restaurants and shops and enhance a downtown's livability. City officials in St. Albans considered the Welden Theatre vital enough to buy it nearly two years ago, when it was in danger of closing. Rutland Mayor Mike Doenges is currently working to bring a theater to his city, which hasn't had one since Flagship Cinemas closed at the start of the pandemic.

"Once there's no movie theater in a downtown, everything else tumbles behind it," Jarvis said.

Just last fall, Jarvis closed his Palace 9 Cinemas because the South Burlington multiplex didn't make enough money to offset its high rent. As for the prospect of closing the Roxy? "It breaks my heart," Jarvis said.

"All my life, everybody was happy to come to the movies. They were happy to give me their money, happy to see me, happy to eat the best popcorn in the state of Vermont," he said. "Now it's very difficult to be on a sinking ship."

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The Kid Stays in the Picture

Jarvis was born into the movie business. In 1957, when he was 3 days old, he spent his first night home from the hospital in a projection booth. "And then every night after that," he said. The whir of film streaming through a projector, which he can imitate uncannily, was soothing. "I can still sleep through any kind of noise," he said.

His father, Merrill Jarvis II, got into the business in 1947 at age 12, traveling around Vermont with his uncle, showing films on a 35mm portable projector in town halls. "I knew right away, This is what I want to do," the elder Jarvis, now 89, told Seven Days in 2013. "I never thought, This is work. I always loved it; I couldn't wait to get there."

Meanwhile, Merrill II's future wife, Lucille Barrett, was growing up in the family that owned the Milton Drive-In and Winooski's Strand Theater — and would eventually build the Burlington Drive-In. The couple met when he was the Milton Drive-In's 17-year-old projectionist and she its 14-year-old cashier. For their first date, they watched The Robe in CinemaScope at the Flynn.

Burlington had four movie theaters in a four-block area in those days. The Flynn, designed for live performances as well as movies, opened in 1930. Now the city's premier live-performance space, the 1,400-seat theater is the only one of the four that remains.

One block away, where Courthouse Plaza now stands, the Strong Theatre opened in 1904. It held 1,500 people, featured private boxes and two balconies, and was the most ornate theater ever built in Burlington, historian Bob Blanchard wrote in his book Lost Burlington, Vermont. A 1971 arson fire destroyed it.

The Majestic Theatre, on the corner of Bank Street and South Winooski Avenue, operated from 1912 until 1954 and was demolished in 1956, said Blanchard, who is finishing a book chronicling Vermont's movie theater history from the silent-film era through the end of Hollywood's golden age, which he considers to be around 1963.

The 1930 State Theatre, located on Bank Street where the Farmhouse Tap & Grill now operates, burned to the ground in 1977 with Bound for Glory on its marquee. Merrill II worked there at the time. Although his family did not build any of those theaters, his grandmother eventually owned the Majestic and a cousin owned the State, which the Jarvis family operated. Merrill II and Lucille would build several other cinemas and, by the 1980s, own or operate nearly every movie theater in greater Burlington.

The Jarvis theater empire grew quickly. After buying the Flynn in 1972, Merrill II built the Showcase 5 on Williston Road (which now houses Higher Ground) and purchased the Century Plaza on Dorset Street (now the site of Barnes & Noble), both in South Burlington. He ran three drive-ins (only Sunset Drive-In Theatre in Colchester still operates) and built a theater in Essex (near Big Lots), a theater in Newport (still in operation), Ethan Allen Cinemas on North Avenue in Burlington and, in 1992, Palace 9 on Shelburne Road in South Burlington.

Merrill II worked with distributors and booked films, while Lucille, who died in 2010, handled day-to-day operations, bookkeeping and human resources.

Merrill III, the oldest of five children, was making popcorn by age 7, running projectors at 8 and managing the Flynn as a teen when his parents were away. He never considered another career. While his siblings all have worked in the family business — and brother Bill Jarvis and his wife owned Morrisville's Bijou Theatre for 27 years — Merrill III is the only one who is still involved. He and his father worked side by side every day.

Merrill II continued to book movies and handle accounting and legal work until two years ago, when a stroke left him bedridden and unable to talk. He now lives in Burlington with 24-hour nursing care.

Despite his love for the business, Merrill II almost left it in the 1990s, when he sold several cinemas to the Australia-based Hoyts Group. But a few years later, he reacquired them. To explain his change of heart, he liked to quote Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

Shortly after that, in 2003, he bought Burlington art house the Nickelodeon Cinemas 6, remodeled it and renamed it Merrill's Roxy Cinemas.

It isn't the first of the Jarvis theaters to struggle. Before it closed in 1981, the Flynn had resorted to showing X-rated movies. Ethan Allen Cinemas became a second-run theater — affectionately known to locals as "the Cheap Seats" — and eventually closed around 2006 because audiences had lost interest in the movies by the time they got there, Merrill III said. By 2013, the family owned just three theaters, Majestic 10, Palace 9 and the Roxy, but they remained committed to the business.

"We've lasted so long because it's in our blood," Merrill III said then. "Everyone else, it's just a corporate business to them. But theaters are our home, and this is our life." He and his dad spoke with Seven Days that year about the industry's switch from film to digital projection, a move that cost roughly $2.5 million.

"Who likes change?" Merrill III said. "But we've got to roll with it."

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Risky Business

Movie theaters have always been a difficult business, and doomsayers have been predicting their demise for decades. In the late 1940s, the rise of television was supposed to spell the end. Then it was video stores in the '80s, followed by home theaters, DVDs, Blu-ray and, now, streaming. While particular theaters come and go, the exhibition industry has always managed to survive.

"It took a pandemic — and/or a strike — to really hamstring the theatrical industry or movie theaters," said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at box office tracker Comscore.

While the number of screens has increased globally since 2020, the U.S. has seen a decline — 7 percent last year alone, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Movie theaters depend on studios to provide a steady stream of hits. The number of wide releases — movies that open or eventually play in at least 2,000 theaters — is down. Fifty-four opened in the first seven months of 2024, about 70 percent of the pre-pandemic average, Comcast numbers show.

Box office revenue for the first quarter of 2024 was nearly 30 percent lower than for the first quarter last year, Dergarabedian said. "The difference between a $410 million April, which we had this year, and a $900 million, nearly billion-dollar April last year — that right there shows you how volatile the industry can be."

Memorial Day weekend 2024 was the worst in decades, he said, but then the summer releases dropped, and a number of movies outperformed expectations. Deadpool & Wolverine brought the industry its highest-grossing R-rated opener in history.

"It's a very fragile business," Dergarabedian said. But he and others believe that movie theaters will always be around. People love stories, and they love watching those stories play out on a big screen as a crowd of other people laugh, gasp and cry alongside them. (Plus, the Wall Street Journal pointed out, theaters may endure simply because it's difficult to repurpose buildings with windowless rooms and sloping concrete floors.)

The industry is here to stay, Dergarabedian said. "It's just not for the faint of heart."

The pandemic and strikes have forced movie theaters into about "30 years of change in five years," he said. People used to go to movies to see the movie, he explained. Now, theaters offer food and cocktails — some with seat-side service — heated, reclining seats; bouncy houses, climbing walls and ball pits. "There's just this trend towards almost creating a theme-park experience in the movie theater," Dergarabedian said.

Technology called 4DX, developed by CJ 4DPlex, creates a total-immersion experience by syncing a movie with a broad slate of sensory effects, such as wind, rain, scents, snow and ticklers. Twisters viewers can get tossed about in their seats, while people watching Deadpool & Wolverine can feel every punch. Instagram influencers provide invaluable marketing for free: "TWISTERS IN 4DX RECAP ... OMG," wrote artsialexi.

Vermont theaters still largely revolve around movies, but tickets, popcorn and candy don't pay the bills. "These are big buildings that require a lot of maintenance. They require a lot of square footage. There's big rents involved," Dallas-based theater marketing consultant Brandon Jones said. And studios take a big bite of ticket revenue, an average of 62 percent, according to Merrill Jarvis III.

Theater owners need to ensure that their programming brings people in the door, said Jones, who owns the marketing firm FilmFrog. "Our inventory is seats and time," he said. "That's literally what we're selling. Any time I don't have somebody sitting in a seat at a certain time, then I'm giving up my inventory for free."

Keys to success include selecting movies that appeal to local audiences and becoming part of the community, according to Jones. People who go to a movie theater to hear a speaker or take their kids to an event will consider that theater next time they're looking for entertainment, he said.

And then the experience needs to be enjoyable. "We're in the going-out business," Jones said. That means having an easy-to-use website and ticketing platform; a clean, comfortable and unique space; and a well-trained staff. Those assets are more important than reclining seats, food service or premium large-format screens, Jones said.

"You are buying into not being distracted," he said. "You're in a dark room with a really impressive picture and immersive sound, and it's one of the only places that any of us are willing to pay to go and be vulnerable with our emotions. And that's the magic."

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The Secret of My Success

In Montpelier, St. Albans and nearby Hanover, N.H., theater owners are meeting the new challenges of their business by staying traditional and engaging the community.

After last summer's floodwaters filled the streets and businesses of downtown Montpelier, the Bashara family was forced to gut and rebuild their Capitol Theater. They considered knocking out a couple of walls to add a restaurant but eventually opted to retain the footprint of the five-screen cinema. They reopened four months later.

Closing the theater, in the family since 1980, was not an option, said Cyndy Golonka, who manages the Capitol and Barre's Paramount Twin Cinema for her family.

Golonka gave the Capitol a classic art deco vibe, with cherry-red walls; big, glossy door pulls shaped like film reels; and lobby carpeting covered with busy triangles that she considers "very Gatsby."

Business is "great," Golonka said on a Wednesday in July, as 12 people stood in line to buy concessions. And that, she pointed out, was for "a matinee — on a sunny day!" She gives the credit to the community, where she feels a newfound appreciation for her theater.

"I think the flood helped, because I think the community realized that we are vital to their downtown and vital to their community," she said.

Blocks away, on Montpelier's Main Street, James O'Hanlon of the Savoy Theater expressed the same appreciation. "The reason I'm still in business at all is because of community support. That's it," he said.

The 43-year-old art house has always had members — there are currently about 265 — and it has always scraped by, O'Hanlon said. He worked as a Savoy projectionist for two years before buying it eight years ago "because I love this place," he said.

"It does not make money," he added, and film distributors' profit-driven, inflexible terms make it hard to stay in business. But O'Hanlon believes in the transformative power of film, so he has run two GoFundMe campaigns in the past two years — the second is still under way — and taken out a loan from Community Capital of Vermont in Barre to keep his two-screen theater open.

He took a huge financial hit last summer, when his basement screening room flooded. The resulting $43,000 renovation was a setback, but it created a better space, he said, with lightweight couches, plastic interior walls and theater equipment that can be hauled to higher ground when floods threaten again.

O'Hanlon dismisses attractions such as 4DX — and even pub food — as gimmicks. He'd rather host a discussion about a documentary. "That's the kind of value-added I want to give people," he said. "You want to get your legs tickled? There's other places you can do that."

To draw audiences, he writes a weekly email newsletter and, in June, hired a marketing professional who started a cinema club that provides post-screening discussions.

In St. Albans, another Main Street theater was in danger of closing in late 2022, but the city stepped in to buy it. Welden Theatre loses about $10,000 a year, city manager Dominic Cloud said, but city officials plan to stick with it for about five years before reevaluating.

"The city's in the place-making business," Cloud said. "We make public investments in the life of the city when there's a market failure that catches our attention and says, Unless the city steps in, the market is going to provide something different than what you envision."

Welden Theatre's previous owners were ready to get out of the business, and people in town want a movie theater, Cloud said. "It's our job to make sure that St. Albans is a community of distinction, that this is a place that people want to stop and shop, come for entertainment and come for dinner out, and live here and start a business."

The Welden has about six apartments on its upper floors, which will provide rental income. So far, the city has removed asbestos and improved the plumbing. Glitzier investments, such as new theater seats and expanded concessions, are planned.

Residents are "overjoyed," Cloud said. If they stop going to the movies, the city will get out of the business, he added. "But right now, it continues to look like a community-owned and -operated theater has legs and is part of a mix of what makes it great to live in St. Albans."

Hanover, N.H., also has a classic theater on its Main Street. Nugget Theaters is owned by the Hanover Improvement Society, which was created in 1922 to run the theater after its founders, the Davisons, gave it to the town. The nonprofit now also owns a hockey rink, an outdoor recreation area that includes a pool and tennis courts, and two rental properties. That diversification helps keep it in business.

"We just work very hard at each of our venues and try to be as lean and mean as we can, and that's how we make it work," improvement society general manager Jeff Graham said. "We throw all the money into a big pot and pay the bills."

While 2023 was a great year for the Nugget — Barbie, Oppenheimer and The Boys in the Boat sold out night after night — Graham credits much of the theater's success to a group of first-year students from nearby Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.

The school selected the theater for a program that assigns student consultants to area businesses struggling with a problem. "Our problem was 'How do we continue to make a mainstream movie theater relevant?'" Graham said. "They had a ridiculous amount of ideas."

The Nugget now offers film series — Harry Potter starts on Thursday — and holiday-themed movies. It sells giant bags of popcorn for parties and will bring back late shows during Dartmouth's academic year. The students offered savvy marketing advice, too, Graham said. "They told us what social media outlets to use and what not to use."

Graham did reject two ideas proposed by the students: reclining seats and alcohol sales. "We're an old-school, mom-and-pop Main Street movie theater," he said. "We're gonna keep doing things the way we've been doing them, just do them better."

Diversification also keeps Brattleboro's Latchis Theatre in business. In addition to being a movie theater and live-performance venue, the 1938 theater has a 30-room boutique hotel and office and retail space it leases out. Four brothers built it in honor of their late father, Peter Latchis. "They called it an entire town under one roof," said Jon Potter, executive director of Latchis Arts and Latchis Corporation.

The Latchis brothers' vision has proved prescient. "For us, that's the key to why we're still around and sustainable," Potter said.

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Weird Science

While they still believe in movies, other theater owners are expanding into new income streams to stay afloat. When Ben Wells bought Middlebury's Marquis Theatre 10 years ago, he gutted one of its three screening rooms to put in a Southwestern restaurant. No pump cheese on nachos there. Thomas Ahearn, formerly of the Bobcat Café in Bristol, cooks from scratch. Patrons place orders at the bar and get a buzzer to alert them to pick up their food, which they are free to take into the theaters, where small food trays snap into armrest cupholders.

The Marquis Theatre & Southwest Café offers free kids' movies in its café on Saturday afternoons and trivia on Thursday nights. "It starts at seven," Wells said. "If you're not here by 5:30, you don't get a seat." Essex Junction- and Middlebury-based Big Guys Entertainment runs trivia, as well as the Marquis' musical bingo, a comedy show, and its monthly "movie roast," where three or four comics wear microphones and offer running commentary during a cheesy flick, à la "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

The Marquis hosts birthday and graduation parties, and, a couple of times a year, the Addison County Bike Club. Wells tried a lot of things before hitting on this winning combination, he said. "We're OK. The lights are on. We're happy."

But, like O'Hanlon at the Savoy, Wells believes that Hollywood needs to listen to theater owners. "It's hard when a movie is making a billion dollars, and we're having to worry about raising the price 5 percent on popcorn so we can pay our electric bill," he said. "There's obviously a bit of a disconnect there that likely isn't sustainable."

The closest a Vermont theater is likely to come to a theme-park vibe is Essex Cinemas, which is profitable, owner Peter Edelmann said, "but it's two-thirds of what it once was." He plans to remove four screens and about 500 seats to create his high-tech entertainment complex, which he aims to open next summer.

While he's renovating, he'll upgrade seats, screens, projection and sound systems in his remaining five theaters. His 400-seat T-Rex theater, which doubles as a live-performance venue, features a 60-foot curved screen, the largest in Vermont.

"If people are going to go to the movies, they want to have a real experience," Edelmann said. "In my opinion, you've got to give them something more, which is why the T-Rex is always the top seller."

His general manager is working to bring morning yoga into that theater, since movies don't start before noon. "We can have 50 people doing yoga on the stage, where otherwise the place would be empty," Edelmann said. "There's so much change and potential out there."

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The Last Picture Show

Any potential Jarvis sees for his downtown movie theater is obscured by his frustration with the city's deterioration. Other than installing high-back, rocking seats, Jarvis has made few capital improvements to the Roxy in recent years. He shifted programming toward mainstream wide releases, he said, when the older audience that typically turned out for independent films failed to return after the pandemic. Last fall, he started $5 Tuesdays, selling seats for all shows for just $5. It's his busiest day of the week, but it still draws only an average of 200 people, he said.

The lobby's mauve-and-brown color scheme and its rows of tacked-up movie posters give the Roxy a drab ambience. Moviegoers seem to like heated, reclining seats and food and drinks served by waitstaff, Jarvis said, but he can't afford that sort of upgrade, and he's not interested in taking on a partner.

His ideas for his languishing theater target a very different audience.

When Miro Weinberger was still mayor of Burlington, Jarvis called his office and complained to a staffer about increasing crime downtown. "I told her, 'I'm going to close the Roxy. And if I can't beat 'em, join 'em,'" he said. "'I'm going to open up a gun store in the Roxy with a shooting range. That way, they can hit their targets and not innocent people. And then I'll have another part of the Roxy turned into a discount spray paint store, so they can get all the colors they want ... Then the third part will be an unsupervised drug shoot-up place.'...

"She didn't like it," Jarvis said, recounting the staffer's reply.

Dark sarcasm aside, the Queen City would undoubtedly feel the void if Jarvis shuttered his theater. If he sells — he hasn't set a date for that decision — the terms will stipulate that the new owner cannot operate a movie theater in the building. Jarvis' father negotiated a similar non-compete clause when he sold the Flynn to the nonprofit Flynn Theatre for the Performing Arts, Ltd. in 1981.

In Burlington on a recent Friday, brothers Roland and Rem Kielman, both fathers of young children, took advantage of a kid-free night to eat tacos and ice cream and see Twisters. Roland, 41, picked the Roxy because he can walk there. "It would be a shame to lose this place," he said. "This is one of the first places I can remember going to a movie as a kid."

Still, he admitted, he hadn't been there in a decade. He recently moved back to Vermont, he said, and parenthood and the pandemic knocked him out of a moviegoing routine.

His brother, Rem, 36, of Hinesburg, admitted that the Roxy would not have been his first choice that night. "If I'm going to see a movie in the movie theater, it's usually one that I want to watch on the big screen, and I want to try to find the biggest screen that I can watch it on," he said. That would be Essex's T-Rex.

Jarvis recently renewed his lease for Majestic 10 and plans to run the Williston multiplex for at least five more years, he said, but he struggles to see a way forward for the Roxy. Because his dad handled much of the business until his stroke, Jarvis hadn't learned all of its aspects. "It's much, much more work than I ever knew he did," he said.

No other family member wants to take over the business, Jarvis said. For years, it's been the father and son, side by side.

"He worked all of his life for this," Jarvis said. "And I've waited all my life ... to run it all. I just wanted him to shut up and let me run the business. And now he can't talk, and it's the only thing I want him to do — is tell me how to do everything."

Ken Picard contributed reporting.