Q&A: A small-town movie theater owner, in a time of Covid-19
To watch a movie at home or to watch a movie at theaters that is the question. Movie theaters are one of the biggest industries hit during the Coronavirus. This does not stop with big movie studios as major theater chains and mom-and-pop theaters are closing every week. Just in Southern California, 300 screens will be closed from Arclight theaters and Pacific theaters. This Hollywood Reporter article gives a look at the hard time movie theaters have been dealing with. So How is a small-town movie theater owner suppose to stay afloat if major movie theater chains cannot? Well, this is what I asked Donny Edson the owner of Cover movie theater in the small town of Fort Morgan Colorado. With a town of fewer than 30,000 people, how is Donny looking to get people into his family theater? Donny Edson bought Cover along with several members of his family in 2018. Within this Q&A we will be asking Donny about his 4 screens almost 600 seat theater and how he is looking to bring in business after a four-month hiatus due to Covid-19.
1) How did you find yourself owning a movie theater?
Well, some of my wife’s family owns a bunch of radio stations, and they had started a promotion with the movie theater where they sold it as a package with radio advertising, where they could do on-screen advertising before the movie started. And the owner said one night he had a dream that we bought the movie theater from him. And so he woke up and decided that he would sell the movie theater. So he called and pitched my father-in-law on it. I mean, it’s like, yeah, I don’t know anything about running a movie theater, and I was like, well, we should look at the financials at least and see it could be a good opportunity. And so we got all this stuff and started looking through. It is really profitable business and a really cool business and broke it down and thought, man, this could be a good investment for us. So in twenty eighteen we move forward and bought it in June of twenty eighteen. So it’ll be three years on June 20th here.
2) With it being a family affair, how does everyone work at the theater?
We bought it with my wife and me and her mom and dad and her sister and her brother. And so we all bought it together. And so there are six of us to own it together as a family. And so we each add something different to it. So I’m in charge of hiring and training the employees, and then I’m in charge of kind of some of the real estate side of everything because we have after we bought it, we started to acquire other real estates around it and remodel it. And kinda it’s not like the historic main street in our town. But when we bought it, there were eight vacant buildings downtown. So we’ve been working on buying them and we fix them up and get new businesses and they’re building apartments on the second floors of some of them. And so I kind of oversee the construction and the real estate side of things and then the employees. And then I’m also in charge of concessions and stuff. So making sure what’s selling well, tracking all the numbers, working on new items, you know, flow how to make things go faster, just little things like that. So those are the pieces that I handle. And my wife does all the accounting and bookkeeping for everything. And then my mother-in-law is kind of the day manager and books parties and works with deliveries and does orders and things like that. My father-in-law does all the maintenance. So any time something breaks. My sister-in-law’s in charge of marketing. So she’s booking parties and doing promotions and things like that all the time, selling the on-screen time as well. And then my brother-in-law is an I.T. guy, so he’s naturally the right guy and handles all the ideas so each of us has our little niche that we do there. And then we all take turns working work in shifts and be in there. It’s really a fun place to be because everybody shows up in a good mood.
3) What are some promotions you have run to get people back into the movie theaters?
We did a lot of stuff during the time. Like one night we just said, come get free popcorn. And we gave everybody three hundred some bags of free popcorn. Everybody pulled their car up. We get the free popcorn just to stay in front of them after we reopen for covid. We got local businesses to sponsor movies, and so we opened up for free just to the public, you know. And so just trying to get the word out there. We did some we did a free movie showing on Halloween and then they took our downtown for Morgan and made a trick-or-treat street down there. And so we got 300 people then for that as well. We had to get very creative. After covid, we started doing different promotional nights. We would do it we did a guy bourbon night where we had a bourbon tasting and then we came and watched Die Hard. We did a ladies' night where they had orders and wine and they came and watched Pretty Woman. We’ve done family nights where we give them cool packages. And so we had to get really creative on that. We’ve done a lot of private parties where we had to go out and solicit people to come and rent the movie theater to do private parties. We just have to keep people in the habit of coming to the movies, because once they do, it’s so much better, such a better experience.
4)What was it like when your first bought the movie theater?
You never know exactly when people are going to be coming, so that’s forecasting when people will come so that you can schedule appropriately so that you can take good care of them. You know, before covid, when we bought the movie theater, they didn’t have a point of sale system, so we installed one so we would have some hard data to use. And like, you know, Avenger’s is a good example. I mean, we started doing online ticket sales, too, and we were selling out all of our shows way beforehand. And what we didn’t take into account was just how much popcorn you would sell, for example. So we got such a rush of people that we were way behind on our popcorn to the extent where we would give people an empty bag and tell them to take it up to the theaters to watch the movie and would bring them and trade them a full back for their empty bag just to get things going. So we didn’t have any raw data to use, but that was only in the first and the second night we knew exactly how much popcorn we sold the first night. So we prepared for it. We popped popcorn ahead of time, made a heating box, and so we had hundreds of bags ready to go. So we didn’t have to react the same way
5) What are some struggles of Owning a Movie Theater?
You’re really at the mercy of Hollywood and what movies they give you. Hollywood requires you to keep a movie for four weeks. And so in the summertime, you might be able to see the new movie, but you might not have the extra screen to show the new movie because you have to, under contract, keep that one movie for four weeks or sometimes even six weeks. And so, you’re losing out on your good real estate on a busy night because you’re showing a movie, you’ve been shown for six weeks and people saw it once or twice and don’t want to see it again. But you have to keep that there, that movie there that long. So that’s been an obstacle since covid. Obviously, we were shut down for about one hundred twenty days. And when we reopen, we don’t have any new movies to offer. So we were shown old movies. And so I mean, it’s been really tough with that as we’re starting to get some new movies, people are really starting to come back, but we don’t know what new movies are going to get released, what new movies will be released online as well.
6)What is your favorite part of owning a movie theater?
I love the rush. Yeah, I love when there’s a line down the block and everybody’s in a good mood and get them through as quick as we can and teach my staff how to upsell. When I’m teaching the staff, they can’t believe how frank I am with customers. A lot of times you might come up and I’ll just be like, hey, how much money you have to spend today? I’ll spend it all. What’s most important to you? Soda or popcorn and especially to the kids. I got twelve dollars. I’m like, OK, cool, we’re going to spend it all. Here’s how we’re going. So I like teaching the kids how to do that. I like the rush of that. You know, I’m a sales guy so I’m always trying to sell. So I’m like, you know when somebody comes up and they go, I’ll have a large popcorn. My first things what are we going to drink with it, you know, and then, oh, look at the drinks. And I’m like, Do you want Peanut Eminem’s or you want licorice tonight? Oh, actually, I have resisted some continuously sell into them that way and I really love that piece of it. But the rush is my favorite. When there’s a line down the block, you’re getting people in as quick as you can, you know, and just all at once. That’s my favorite part of it.
7) You mentioned, building around the Movie Theater can you talk about that more?
You know, things live on here, so the theater we have is the actual building, 100 years old, and we keep adding on to it and we’re doing another addition to it right now as well. We’re like we bought the building next to it and we’re making that our concession stand and ticket area so we can have more ticket windows and more concession stands to get people in quicker and sell them more.
8) Why is returning to the movies important? And how do you attempt to get people back in?
We learn that when Wonder Woman came out on Christmas because when we read the reviews of everybody who watched it at home, they thought it was awful. Yeah. And then when you read the reviews, everybody who watched it in the theater, loved it because that sound in that action is so much different than when you watch it at home. So we have to keep people in the habit of coming back to the movies and trying the popcorn. It just the whole experience, and they like it. And, you know, even like some of the recent new releases that have come out wouldn’t have been necessary blockbusters because they’ve done very well. The Kong Godzilla did very well for us, probably about 50 percent of what it would do in a non Covid year, but still compared to other movies, way better. And even Mortal Kombat did really well for us, which, you know, isn’t. I mean, there’s a certain demographic that wants to come to watch that. But it did really well for us, too. So we think that that’ll help us keep going. We do a lot of promotions. We’re just trying to stay in front of people, a lot of free things when we can just to get them in the door, things like that. So, yeah, it’s been tough, and still a lot of marketing. We radioed marketing. We do social media marketing, do a lot of things there too. But it’s got to get people back in the habit of coming. So but you’ve got to have a good movie for them to see. They won’t just come for nothing.
