Sundance, a good idea whose time had gone

What a tale it would have been. A movie theater, where people go to escape reality, would be built in defiance of financial reality. Sundance Cinemas, Robert Redford's come-for-a-movie, stay-for-an-evening multiplex, would spring to life despite the financial difficulties plaguing General Cinemas, the project's major investor. For a few months, it looked like Redford and Rodin, Sundance and Penn, just might pull it off. Construction proceeded in fits and starts. Tours were given to the media. Opening dates were predicted in hush-hush conversations. But alas, it was not to be. No movie theater at the corner of 40th and Walnut. No escape from financial reality. In the end, General Cinemas' October bankruptcy managed to drag Penn's dreams down. You might be wondering how a company like General Cinemas managed to go belly up at a time when more Americans spend more money to see more movies than ever before. Losing money would seem to be a difficult thing for a theater chain to do. Nonetheless, most major theater chains have been managing to do just that. They built theaters to meet the demand that would have existed if all of their competitors weren't also building theaters in all the same places. Sometimes, they built theaters in places where there wasn't any demand at all. They accumulated massive amounts of debt. And then, when it turned out there just weren't enough people to fill all the seats, many chains went bankrupt. Quite a few more are not far behind. Of course, these companies knew full well that showing a film on more screens only increases the number of people who will come watch to a certain point. To avoid overkill, theater companies divide the country into "film zones," extending three to five miles from any theater showing a particular film. No other theater in that area can show the same film. As a result, theater companies didn't build new theaters in film zones where they were already operating unless they were ready to relegate the old theater to showing films that were less likely to make money, or close it altogether. These seem like simple rules to follow, and until 1995, most cinema chains were following them without difficulty. Then AMC opened up a 24-screen theater in Dallas and revolutionized the cinema business. Soon, if your theater didn't have surround sound and stadium seating, it just couldn't compete. This enabled companies to move in on their competitor's turf -- something you can't do unless you've improved upon the established product -- and forced companies to build new theaters long before their old theaters could or should have been closed. What's worse, theater companies were often unable to close now-unprofitable older theaters because they were tied up in long-term leases. Which meant that the new theater not only needed to cover its own construction and operation costs, it needed to make up the construction and operation deficit for the older theater it supplanted. Suddenly, there were 37,000 movie screens serving a national market able to support, by most estimates, no more than 28,000. Something had to give. For General Cinemas, Sundance and Penn, it did. Still and all, I say Penn administrators deserve a pat on the back for trying. Yes, Penn got caught up in the theater craze. And why not? After all, this campus was a better bet for a multi-screen theater than any number of other towns that now have 14 screens and about the same number of people. This is one of the projects that should have been built, one of the places that actually did need a new theater. Sure, the coffee shop at the back was overkill and the art gallery was nothing more than soul candy for the casually cultured. But this thing could have worked, and we would have loved it. Which means that no one should be gloating this morning, save the owner of Cinemagic 3. That man is entitled to a sigh of relief.

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