Long Island movie theaters: More are reopening

Joe Lavinio remembers the glory days of the movies on Long Island. As an usher and ticket-taker at the Southampton Theater starting in 1954, Lavinio saw Gary Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn walk through the doors, he recalls, and sat through multiple showings of "Ben-Hur" and "The Ten Commandments." When the theater shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lavinio, now 84 and a retired schoolteacher, wasn’t sure it would ever reopen.

So he was thrilled when the venue returned in mid-February as the Southampton Playhouse, a not-for-profit with a stated mission to serve as a "premiere cultural destination" for the area. Since then, Lavinio and his wife have taken in a showing of the 1932 classic "Scarface" and even watched the Oscars there as part of a free event that included a trivia contest.

"It felt wonderful," Lavinio said. "We watch a lot of films on our TV at home, but now that the movies are opened, I go."

If you thought the movies were dead, just look around. All over Long Island, cinemas are reopening, remodeling or expanding — with possibly more screens to come. The Southampton Playhouse joins the South Bay Cinemas in West Babylon, which reopened last July after nearly a decade, and the Mattituck Cinemas, which reopened in November with new reclining seats and a menu that includes margaritas. In January, Huntington’s Cinema Arts Centre took over operations at the North Shore Towers Cinema in Floral Park, Queens, just beyond the Nassau County border. And a group of investors is hoping to give an old Westhampton Beach theater a new lease on life in the coming months.

"With the pandemic and other things that have come up, people are eager to have reasons to leave their home," said Maria A. Ruiz Botsacos, the executive director of the Southampton Playhouse and a former vice president at Film at Lincoln Center. Streaming platforms and cable television may offer ease and convenience, but movies still offer something special, she adds. "It’s a way of going back into society for a shared experience." (The theater was purchased in 2022 by Aby Rosen and Charlie Rosen of RFR Holding, in partnership with Alex Black, CEO of Lyrical Media.)

OVERCOMING DIFFICULTIES

The future of movies has looked anything but bright over the past few years. After the pandemic shuttered U.S. cinemas for much of 2020, many of Long Island’s smaller venues never recovered. The Squire Cinemas, the long-running art house in Great Neck, and the Franklin Square Cinemas both closed before the year’s end. Coram’s Movieland Cinemas, the Merrick Cinemas V and the Herricks Cinemas 4 reopened for a time, but all eventually went dark. The Malverne Cinema and Art Center, run by spouses Anne and Henry Stampfel for three-plus decades, struggled valiantly until finally closing its doors late last year. Hicksville's Cinema de Lux Broadway went dark in January.

"It was devastating," Bruce Nash, founder of the industry tracking firm The Numbers, said of the early years of the pandemic. "The only way that the major theater chains survived was through forbearance on rent through their landlords, and forbearance on debt. For the smaller theater chains, it wiped some of them out."

For the cinemas left standing, it’s been tough to get moviegoers off the couch. "It used to be your average, ordinary movie would bring the people in, and now they really don’t," said Phil Solomon, owner of PJ Cinemas in Port Jefferson. "I think the conversations now are, ‘Hey, what are you watching on Netflix?’ ”

The annual box office tallies would seem to bear that out. Each year has generally improved over the last, driven by tentpole movies like 2022’s "Top Gun: Maverick" and 2023’s twin juggernauts "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer." But each year has also seen some serious misfires. Marvel stumbled in 2023 with "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" (an underperformer despite its $476 million in sales) and "The Marvels" (the first box-office flop of the MCU), while Warner Bros. watched two much-hyped releases, "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" and "Joker: Folie à Deux," flounder at the box office. The year-end haul for 2024 came in at $8.5 billion, down 3.8% from 2023 and still far short of 2019’s $11 billion total.

"It was very tough for a couple of years as the market recovered and people started coming back to theaters," Nash said, but he added: "We’re past that now." He noted that the major studios are wisely cutting back their output, while smaller outfits such as Mubi (a distributor of the Oscar-winning "The Substance") are seeing room to grow. Meanwhile, the theater industry overall is benefiting from an ongoing shift to digital projection, he said, which saves on shipping costs (no more bulky cans of 35 mm film) and allows venues to be nimbler with their choices.

"I think this may be driving the story on Long Island," Nash said.

REVIVAL IN SAYVILLE

Among the region’s optimistic new theater operators is Devin Fickling, whose family runs two property management companies that own retail units and apartments in the Sayville area. Fickling had never run a cinema before, he said, but when the Sayville Cinemas, a local landmark that the family owns, closed over a rent dispute in early 2023, he decided to run it himself. Looking at the Hollywood pipeline at the time, he predicted that upcoming titles such as "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" would be moneymaking hits. "And this prediction was luckily very true," Fickling said.

Rebranded as the Sayville Theater, the four-screen venue now boasts several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of upgrades, Fickling estimates, including new laser projectors and screens. New reclining seats are also planned. The theater’s staff creates their own preshow content, rather than buying it from an outside vendor, and maintains an active Instagram account that includes a mascot of sorts, the Popcorn Bandit. (Think of the Hamburglar from McDonald’s, Fickling suggests.)

After learning how to operate the projectors and manage a crew of 20 — most of them teenagers — Fickling now claims success: Over Thanksgiving, he said, the one-two combination of "Wicked" and "Moana 2” set attendance records at the venue. "There’s nothing like going to a movie theater with your family, eating some popcorn and seeing it on the big screen together," Fickling said. "We’re confident that our investments into the theater are going to pay off big-time."

Also taking a gamble are four investors operating as Enthusiasm LLC who have purchased the old Hampton Arts I & II, a two-screen venue in Westhampton Beach, in hopes of turning it into an upscale cinema called the Sunset Theater. "We are at the tail-end of construction," Inge Debyser, one of the investors, said in January. (The venue’s tentative opening date has since been pushed to April from February.)

The plan is to screen a mix of first-run movies and repertory programming, Debyser said. One auditorium has a 14-foot-wide stage that could lend itself to live events such as music or comedy, she added, and there’s an upstairs space — previously used for storing film canisters — that will be transformed into a bar.

Debyser noted that she and her co-investors are all parents, a motivating factor for opening the theater. "Teenagers, they are really spending way too many hours on their cellphones," she said. "I think there’s a real need for a place where people meet and connect. That’s what the movie industry is about."

ICONIC THEATER EXPANDS

Also bullish on the movies is Dylan Skolnick, co-director of the Cinema Arts Centre, who said his expansion into the North Shore Towers is the first of its kind for his 52-year-old venue. The North Shore is only a single-screen cinema with 377 seats, housed inside a residential high-rise and with no exterior marquee, according to Skolnick, but he added that it’s a good way to serve a western portion of Long Island.

"We’ve had a lot of people who’ve been saying, ‘Oh, we used to live near you, and it was too far to go,’ ” Skolnick said.

Since taking over the North Shore in mid-January, Skolnick has been programming popular first-run titles such as "Conclave," "A Real Pain" and "A Complete Unknown," but also such classics as "North by Northwest," "Singin’ in the Rain" and "Citizen Kane," which were all accompanied by guest speakers. The theater currently operates Thursdays through Sundays, but Skolnick hopes to add more days if ticket sales keep improving.

"We’re working now to start spreading the word outside the building. So hopefully people will start coming from Lake Success, Great Neck, New Hyde Park," Skolnick said. "But so far, the response has been very positive."

Movies may not ever dominate American culture the way they did when Lavinio, the onetime ticket-taker, was a teen. But experts say things might be looking up. Nash predicts a roughly $9.2 billion gross for 2025, an 8% increase over last year. And in a recent report, the consulting firm PwC said global cinema revenue in 2026 is "poised to surpass" the pre-pandemic level of 2019.

"It’s now a much more fragmented market, which makes it harder to track what’s going on," Nash said of the theatrical industry. "But if you know your audience and you can find the right films for them, then you can make a pretty good business case for it. And I think that’s where the market is evolving."

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com