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The Athena Grand owners discuss their decision to close the Athens theater after nearly 20 years
< < Back toATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — Rick Frame recalls the days when they would take a 35-millimeter print of the latest blockbuster movie and show it on three screens simultaneously at the Athena Grand.
The film would loop through the projector in one booth and then run across the room to the next booth and loop through the projector there and then on to the third.
Everything had to be timed just so to make it work. One hiccup and suddenly you’ve got three blank screens and seats full of unhappy customers.
Much has changed since then during the 19 years Frame has run the Athena Grand theater in Athens, which will screen its final showings on Jan. 5 before its doors are closed for good.
The margins were thin but business was steady over the years as Frame and co-owner Mike Little plowed their profits back into the theater to try and keep up with the times and the latest in movie technology — all the while keeping ticket prices fixed at $5, as they were on the first day it opened.
2019 was a particularly good year, and the owners were planning to make another big investment in theater upgrades.
Then COVID hit. Had it not been for some generous federal aid, the Athena Grand might not have survived the pandemic.
“Every movie theater in the country would have shut down had it not been for that program,” Little said.
Following months of closure as a nonessential business, the theater reopened with social distancing requirements that kept most of its seats empty. And since Hollywood wasn’t turning out movies during the shutdown, there wasn’t much new content to screen.
Then no sooner did film production start ramping back up, the actors’ strike began, shutting the industry down again.
Meanwhile, many people were growing accustomed to just watching the latest releases at home, even if that meant waiting a few weeks for them to arrive on a streaming service.
Blockbusters and concessions drive revenue at the Athena Grand
The Athena Grand’s owners managed to weather all of this as hundreds of theaters across the country closed, leaving many smaller communities with no place to go locally to see a movie on the big screen.
But just as business was picking up once again, two recent developments led Frame and Little to the difficult decision they announced in a Facebook post the week before Thanksgiving.
Their landlord was asking them to sign a long-term lease. And the historic Athena Cinema in uptown Athens, which has traditionally served the role of art house theater, started adding first-run blockbusters to its lineup.
Commercial theaters count on the blockbusters to fill seats and the lines for concessions. For every dollar in revenue from ticket sales, the theater keeps 42 cents, Little said. The rest pays for the digital rights to show the movie. It’s the popcorn and soda and hot dogs and mounds of candy that pays the bills.
The Athena uptown, which is owned by Ohio University, was siphoning off this critical audience, Little said. He and Frame were unwilling to sign a long-term lease not knowing how many or even which blockbuster movies the uptown theater was going to screen, and the impact this was going to have on their bottom line.
They knew their landlord would probably agree to a short-term lease for a while, but it was still too much of a gamble. Frame and Little are both well past the age when most people are retiring and didn’t want to take the risk.
“Once the Athena starts taking tickets away from us it makes no sense,” Little said.
The competition has also made it challenging to sell the theater, which they’ve been trying to do. Little said they were close to a deal with one potential buyer. Then one day he called them from his car. He had just driven past the Athena uptown and saw “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” on the marquee.
He said there was no way he could compete with another theater in town showing first-run blockbusters, especially one so close to the university, and backed out of the deal. No other serious potential buyers have since come forward.
Little said that even if he were younger and more willing to take financial risks “I wouldn’t buy it now.” He said the Athena Grand would need to be transformed into something more than a movie theater, some kind of entertainment complex, at a cost of millions of dollars, to compensate for the losses on the movie side.
‘Oh, it was crazy’
Of course, competition is a fact of life in business. Some win, some lose. What bothers the Athena Grand’s owners is the competition in this case is coming from a university-owned nonprofit whose mission, as expressed on its website, is to provide a forum for independent and international films and documentaries.
Mission aside, it’s difficult to compete against an organization that, as a nonprofit, can operate at a loss, Little said, something the Athena Grand cannot do and survive.
Little said they tried to call the university’s president to discuss their concerns. They were directed to send an email to the president’s general email box, which they did. They did not receive a response.
University spokesman Dan Pittman said the email “was shared with the appropriate academic leaders for consideration.”
Pittman noted that while the Athena Cinema, which has three screens, may feature more “mainstream” films, “the cinema’s core charge remains focused on providing a multitude of education and community programming options.”
Pittman added that “while the University subsidizes a portion of the cinema’s expenses in support of its academic mission, any profits have traditionally been reinvested in building maintenance, renovation efforts and other operational expenses.”
Ironically enough, Frame got his first hands-on experience running a movie theater at the Athena Cinema. In the months leading up to the opening of the Athena Grand in November 2005, the crew at the uptown theater showed him the ropes.
Before then, Frame had already had a long career as a manager and then an owner of Ponderosa Steakhouse restaurants. He moved to Athens in late 1980 to manage the Ponderosa there and ultimately ran 39 locations for the company. He later bought five franchises of his own.
After the Big Bear supermarket on East State Street closed in 2004, an Athens friend of his who was in the lumber business, Emmett Conway, suggested the vacant building would be a great spot for a theater.
Frame was ready for something different and went on an internet message board asking if anyone knew how to open a theater. He got a reply from someone with B&B Theaters, one of the largest theater chains in the country.
B&B ended up helping with the renovation of the old supermarket into a modern movie theater. A 6-foot-deep network of underground tunnels for the market’s refrigeration lines allowed them to dig down to create the stadium seating.
The Athena Grand opened the first week of November 2005 as an independent theater, not part of the B&B chain, and it remained independent. Conway owned the building and Frame ran the business.
The first big movie screened at the theater was the fourth installment in the Harry Potter series, which was released two weeks later.
“Oh, it was crazy,” Frame said. It was a midnight showing and more than 1,500 people came to see it.
Nine years later, Frame and his longtime friend Little bought the theater from Conway. Frame continued to run the day-to-day operations and “my job was to pester Rick,” Little said.
The pandemic brought permanent disruptions for the Athena Grand
Frame and Little first met over 50 years ago when the two were teenagers working at the Dippy Whip burger joint in Flatwoods, Kentucky. The two joined the Navy together and were both stationed in California. After the military, they went their separate ways: Frame into the restaurant business and Little into the technology sector, where he spent the rest of his career.
Business at the theater remained steady, and the new owners learned to plan for the predictable cycles in the movie business. The big releases in the summers and around the fall and winter holidays helped subsidize the rest of the year, especially the typical money-losing months of January, February and August.
The growth of streaming was a concern, but before the pandemic there was a general rule that theaters would have exclusive rights to new releases for 90 days before they could be shown on streaming services.
That window has shortened since the pandemic and is now down to a month or so, leaving theaters with less time to squeeze the revenue they need out of the blockbuster films to keep the doors open.
Given all the pandemic and post-pandemic challenges, Frame and Little considered raising ticket prices. The theater had always generated enough profit that the owners never saw the point in raising prices before.
And the concern now is higher ticket prices might just encourage more people to stay home and stream, offsetting any potential revenue gains, Little said.
There’s still a chance a buyer might come along in the next couple of weeks with deep enough pockets or enough appetite for risk, or both, to save the Athena Grand.
In the meantime, after a long run, Frame is preparing for the final roll of credits on the theater’s 11 screens. His crew will turn out the lights and lock the doors for the last time, and the smell of hot butter and popcorn will slowly dissipate.