Screening the World by Stuart Hanson

Author:Stuart Hanson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030189952
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

For the foreseeable future, one trade journal argued, the fate of the multiplex would “be bound up with that of the shopping centre.”32

The multiplex construction that was undertaken in the initial building phase from 1985 to 1990 took place in areas carefully chosen using a range of criteria, including the multiplex’s accessibility to the surrounding population. In Britain, this figure was minimally 200–300,000 people within a 20-minute drive,33 up to 500–600,000 people within a 45-minute drive.34 The imperative on the part of the multiplex operators was to make it convenient for the surrounding population to drive to the cinema and park safely, conveniently and for free. The decision to build in any location was determined by a complex set of issues around potential demand as compared to the cost base such as rent, depreciation, maintenance, and utilities.35 The sites chosen were overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, in out-of-town locations around major cities and conurbations. Very often these were greenfield sites, cited frequently by developers as the only places on which multiplexes could be constructed, since with anything up to 12 screens and auditoria on a single floor the new multiplexes needed large ground areas of 3000–4000 square metres, which along with car parking added up to some 15,000 square metres.36

A reliance on private, rather than public, transport was the corollary of these out-of-town developments and this mobile population was one that the multiplex was able to court since they could offer sites that were convenient, near motorways, with free car parks, whilst many city cinemas could not. In their study of the patronage of multiplex and non-multiplex cinemas, Collins et al. argued that those who travelled to out-of-town multiplexes were less sensitive to travel time and distance than those who went to cinemas in city centres.37 In part, this might reflect a reliance on and necessity for private transport on the part of those who lived outside of city centres. This hypothesis seemed borne out by the Cinema Advertising Association’s (CAA) 2002 Cinema and Video Industry Audience Research (CAVIAR) 20 audience study, which indicated that 74 per cent of people who visited the cinema travelled there by car.38 Speaking at a seminar organised by the British Film Institute (BFI) in 1985, Pamela Hare-Duke, the Cinema Director of the Cornerhouse in Manchester, criticised the then-current plan “to build multiplexes at the end of motorways,” adding that they would be “okay for Volvo owners but not for viewers.”39

Retail and leisure developments throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, then, were dominated to a large extent by: an increase in car ownership; the long and steady process of urban decentralisation; a lack of suitable sites for development in city centres; cheaper land and property rents in out-of-town sites; and the introduction of development zones with the concomitant relaxation in planning. The accompanying increase in multiplex developments proceeded apace and notwithstanding some slowdowns in openings and the realisation that in some regions competition between multiplexes had resulted in over-screening; the majority of sites opened were outside of the traditional city centres.

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