Kaitaia's cinema on the brink

Mark Osborne - If Kaitaia doesn't use its cinema it might well lose it. Photo / Peter Jackson

Covid-19 has not been kind to the movie industry, including cinemas. And Kaitaia's Te Ahu cinema is certainly feeling the pressure.

A few weeks short of its 10th anniversary, it was now entering the zone where Kaitaia would need to use or it lose it, Te Ahu Charitable Trust general manager Mark Osborne said last week.

The cinema was closed during last year's Covid-19 lockdown, re-opening under alert levels 2 and 1, but even with no restrictions on audience numbers it had not regained the support it had had prior to the epidemic.

"The whole movie industry is in trouble, particularly small independent cinemas like Te Ahu," Osborne said, not only because of audience restrictions but because movies weren't being made or distributors weren't releasing them until cinemas were back in business, not in New Zealand but around the world.

"There used to a be a kind of gentlemen's agreement that cinemas could screen new films for 90 days before they were released elsewhere, but now a lot of them are going straight to the market. Some are even going simultaneously to television, but even if they don't do that, people have more options for watching them now than going to a cinema.

The three years prior to 2020 had seen Te Ahu audience numbers growing 10 to 20 per cent year on year, but then Covid arrived, "and zip." Even when the lockdown ended it was not financially viable to operate the theatre above alert level 1, with audiences limited to 30 as opposed to the pre-Covid full house of 120.

Thirty was the minimum needed to cover costs, but even that wasn't being achieved now. Eight screenings over three days, Friday to Sunday, earlier this month had attracted a total of 34 customers. Two of them attracted none at all.

From the start, Osborne said, school holidays had been key to the cinema's financial success.

"We had 13 weeks to really do well," he said," but this summer we had no new movies to screen and glorious weather. It was a disaster. From Boxing Day to January 10, when we should have been really busy, we were getting 10 on a good day. If we had had bad weather they would have been queuing out the door."

The cinema was very affordable, he added, but people had either lost interest in seeing old films or were watching new ones by other means. And while the situation was not yet critical, the trust could not continue subsidising the cinema indefinitely.

"It's costing us $500 to $1000 a week to keep it open, and we can't keep chucking money away like that. And I would be loathe to close it temporarily. If we did that it would probably never open again," he said.

Staff were always happy to order specific films on demand or organise events, but the best thing people who valued the cinema could do was to spend $8, take a seat and watch a movie.