Coming soon to a theater near you ... another theater near you

By Bryan Gentry

Published: July 19, 2008

Movie theaters in Lynchburg are slated to get a new competitor next year, as Regal Entertainment opens the first new theater here in 17 years.

Regal will operate the 56,000- square-foot movieplex in River Ridge mall, in the location of the Value City store that closed last month.

The 14 screens will raise the region’s screen count to 32. It also will add another 2,400 seats.

The new theater will have digital surround sound and new concessions, and will be the first in the area with stadium seating.

An official with Regal said he’s confident the market has enough demand to support the theater.

But will there be room for other new theaters as well?

The movie theater business can be extremely competitive — if two theaters locate within three miles of each other, they can’t both get the same movie at the same time. Sometimes, the potential for competition keeps a theater out.

The development of the Regal theater has put on hold plans to secure a theater for the Lakeside Center development planned by English Construction. The project came about because of the efforts of the mall’s parent company, CBL & Associates Properties, and Regal Entertainment Group. Both Tennessee-headquartered companies were looking at bringing a better theater to Lynchburg.

“That’s really what the residents and the shoppers have been asking for,” said Katie Reinsmidt, corporate communications director for CBL.

She said the company learned that some people in the Lynchburg area were driving an hour to theaters in Roanoke and Charlottesville.

“We’ve been looking at this option for a while. We felt that it was an important addition to the area, and that the market demanded a first-class entertainment destination.”

Meanwhile, Regal was already eyeing the Lynchburg area for a theater. At one time, the company was in talks with English Construction about putting a Regal theater at Lakeside Center.

The mall announced the plans for the new theater in May.

Chad Browning, marketing manager for Regal, said, “One of the main reasons why we’re going into Lynchburg is (that) there’s no state-of-the-art theater in that area. Particularly there’s no stadium (seating) theater in … Lynchburg.”

Stadium seating was once considered a fad that would go out of style, but it’s proven to be essential, said Dale Hurst, director of marketing for Carmike Cinemas, which runs two theaters in Lynchburg.

While a sloping auditorium floor was for a long time the standard in movie houses, stadium seating puts each row of seats on risers, about a foot higher than the row in front, Browning said.

That reduces the chance that a tall person could block the view of someone behind them.

“There’s no bad seat in the house,” Hurst said. “If you get the tallest person sitting in front of you, it’s no problem — unless it’s Abraham Lincoln wearing a big stove top hat.”

Hurst said stadium seating also gets viewers higher, preventing them from having to look up to watch the movie, and it tends to provide more legroom.

Lynchburg currently has 22 big screens — 10 at the discount Cinemark theater in Candler’s Station, four at the Carmike in River Ridge mall, and eight at Carmike’s Plaza location.

The Carmike at the Plaza was the last one to open, in 1991. The Cinemark theater in Candler’s Station opened the year before.

The Carmike theater in the mall will close once the Regal theater opens next year. James Dolan, mall manager, said it will be converted to retail space.

Browning said he’s certain the Regal theater — with new concessions, digital surround sound, and plush rocking seats — will do well in the market.

“Theaters bring restaurants, and restaurants bring people,” Booth said. “It creates synergy around the shopping environment.”

Booth said at one point he was in discussions with Regal to run a theater in Lakeside Center. His discussions went further with another company, though.

“We’re still pursuing it. We may not be as successful as we previously thought, but we are very much pursuing it and still think it’s a possibility,” he said.

The final decision about whether Lakeside will get a theater will be determined by the success of the Regal at the mall, Booth said.