Why can't Houston get a new movie theater inside the Loop? The 'burbs got 'em.

Tyrese Gibson had two jobs on his recent visit to Houston. The "Fast & Furious" actor arrived on a recent warm June evening to promote "F9," the latest installment in the "F&F" franchise, and metaphorically smash a champagne bottle against the bow of the Regal Cinemas theater chain's newest cruise-ship of a multiplex, the 105,389-square-foot Regal Benders Landing in Spring. He energetically sang the praises of the 24-screen complex - featuring the variously immersive RPX, 4DX and ScreenX auditoriums, huge screens showing trailers outside and in the lobby, a B-Fresh smoothie bar, a Lavazza coffee stand, an arcade and a full-service bar - to the assembled crowd at the invitation-only grand opening and on Instagram. "I'm here in Houston and I'm looking at this theater, and I have literally never been to a theater more sexy in my life," he enthused. The moment was the star-endorsed cherry on top of a movie-going sundae for residents of Montgomery County and northern Harris County who've seen their options for catching a film in a theater expand widely over the past few years. Since 2018, the area has welcomed Xscape at 1488 in Conroe, Cinépolis in The Woodlands, Star Cinema Grill Springwoods in Spring, AMC Metropark Square in Shenandoah and Cut! By Cinemark in Cypress. Communities to the south and west of Houston have also seen a boom with Xscape launching its second Texas location in Katy in 2018 and Star Cinema Grill opening a Richmond multiplex in 2019 featuring an auditorium with a 46-foot Samsung Onyx Cinema LED screen, one of only two such screens in the world at the time of construction (the other was in Beijing). Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse's sole Houston-area location Katy opened in 2018 and, in early 2020, Triple Tap Ventures - the company that owns the Alamo Drafthouse franchise for this region - announced a second location to be built in League City. But all this activity is like a donut with a big hole in the middle. In central Houston, specifically inside the 610 loop where, with the closure of Landmark's River Oaks Theater earlier this year, residents have fewer options. (Though five miles outside the Loop, AMC Studio 30 - which distinguished itself with Asian programming that drew many from inside the Loop - also closed at the end of 2020.) What remain are specialty screens (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and 14 Pews) and a collection of aging multiplexes such as AMC Houston 8, Regal's Greenway Grand Palace and, just outside the Loop, Regal's Marq'E, which just started major renovations that will bring it more in line with its shiny, new Benders Landing sibling. The exception is iPic, opening in 2015 in the upscale River Oaks District development, though its higher price point and proclamation that it's "America's premier luxury restaurant-and-movie theater brand" make it more of a niche or special-occasion destination than the average AMC. Also opening in the last few years have been the outdoor Rooftop Cinema Club on the top of BLVD Place in Uptown just outside the Loop; Moonstruck Drive-In east of downtown and pandemic-inspired pop-up drive-ins like those from Houston Museum of African American Culture and Rooftop Cinema Club. But none of these are traditional indoor theaters. Why the Loop seems to be a forgotten zone for theaters is a question that has irked many inner-city moviegoers. One of them is Cheryl Boyd, a retired attorney in he Upper Kirby neighborhood who, pre-COVID, would go to the movies weekly, often at the River Oaks. "It just doesn't make any sense for a city of this size," she says, noting she's intrigued by the likes of Alamo Drafthouse. "But I wouldn't drive that far to go see a movie. I mean, you have to pack a bag just to do that." Economics 101 If retail follows rooftops, as the old real-estate adage goes, then it would seem a lot of money is being left on the table by overlooking the Loop. According to the city of Houston, Loop 610 - from Greater Heights in the west to the East End, Kashmere Gardens in the north to the Med Center and Braeswood in the south - sprawls across 96 square miles (twice as large as San Francisco) and has a population, according to the 2010 census, of 443,949 people - making it more populous than the cities of Atlanta, Minneapolis, Miami and New Orleans. And developers want state-of-the-art theaters in their projects, says Dennis Taro, executive managing director for the Patrinely Group, a Houston real estate firm specializing in mixed-use, commercial and multi-family projects. He worked on attracting retailers to CityPlace at Springwoods Village, the Spring development that includes the new Hewlett-Packard headquarters, restaurants, residential - and Star Cinema Grill, the Houston-based, dine-in theater chain with locations all across suburban Houston in Richmond, Spring, Conroe, Missouri City, Cypress, Baybrook, Vintage Park and Webster as well as outside the metro in College Station. "By and large, the people who go to movie theaters are spending a lot of money on food and alcohol," says Taro, noting the days are long gone when some developers a generation ago shied away from theaters because they might attract either a rowdy crowd or young people who don't spend much. "Nowadays, it's exactly the kind of customers you want to frequent your project." "If you think about who the clientele is for these movies, it is people with a lot more discretionary cash on their hands," says Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst for Exhibitor Relations Co., an entertainment-industry research and data firm in Los Angeles. "You're paying 20 bucks a ticket for an IMAX and with these plush seats and expensive dinners and drinks and things like that. So the theater exhibitors are catering to this sort of clientele now. And this is where the money is, or at least that's where they think the money is, and that's where they're going to be heading over the next 10 years." But, for central Houston, it's not quite that simple. "The economics of doing a movie theater in the Loop is more challenging," says Jason Ostrow, vice-president of development for Star Cinema Grill. "There's the availability of square footage that's needed for a theater. The price per square foot of rent that's needed inside the Loop ... When you start venturing out in the burbs, like our Richmond location, or (Regal's) Benders Landing is a perfect example, those are big, open pieces of land at a much, much cheaper price. You can put a lot more money into the build-out. You can just do a deal that makes a lot more financial sense and recoup your investment at a faster rate." Luis Olloqui, CEO of Cinépolis USA, the U.S. offshoot of the Morelia, Mexico-based theater chain that's the fourth largest in the world, says his company has been searching inside the Loop for a location but has, so far, come up empty. "None have materialized," he says via e-mail. "We don't build stand-alone theaters, therefore we depend on a shopping center developer to find the space and build it. It's a matter of having the right land, with the entitlements, and the right economics." Part of the issue is the higher costs of center-city development can't simply be transferred to the consumer. "Ticket prices can't move too far away from the city's average," says Olloqui. "So that makes it more difficult for a theater to make money downtown." Jeremy Devine, vice-president of marketing and content for ShowBiz Cinemas, a Dallas-based company with theaters in Kingwood, Humble, Baytown and far northeastern Houston off Beltway 8, agrees that Houston is "under-screened" inside the Loop. But he says such a location would be especially difficult for ShowBiz as their family-entertainment-center concept includes an amenity that also demands a lot of space - a bowling alley. And let's not even get started on parking. "You have the Star Cinema Grill, they've got full food service and a movie, right? You have ShowBiz family entertainment centers and they literally have bowling, arcades, a bar and movie theaters," he says. "It requires a certain larger footprint which is dependent on more affordable land costs." But, hey, what about Dallas? Still, other major cities - some of which sport land values higher than Houston - have managed to attract mixed-use projects that include large multiplexes in core neighborhoods. Downtown Los Angeles has Regal's LA Live and an outpost of Alamo Drafthouse. In fact, the Texas chain, in recent years, also has expanded to Brooklyn and San Francisco's Mission District, hardly low-cost areas. Closer to home, Dallas has an Alamo Drafthouse in The Cedars neighborhood just south of downtown (one of six Alamos in DFW), a Cinépolis in Victory Park, just north of downtown, and Landmark's Magnolia arthouse in nearby Uptown. Taro says Houston has some peculiarities that make it unique, such as booms and busts in the energy market. "I think development in Houston has been difficult for the last five to seven years," he says. "Then we had the pandemic. The market has never truly recovered." "I know that we've even looked at projects in Dallas that have made more sense than some in Houston," says Star Cinema Grill's Ostrow. Representatives from AMC, Regal and Triple Tap Ventures declined to comment for this story. But the end credits haven't yet rolled. Many believe that there will be a happy ending in which a developer and an exhibitor meet cute and make the numbers work. Whether it's a chain that's already in the market or someone else remains to be seen, as does the programming, which may be strictly mainstream or may try to fill the arthouse void left by the closing of the River Oaks. (Incidentally, four of the major chains - Cinemark, Alamo Drafthouse, Studio Movie Grill and Cinépolis USA - are based in Texas.) Bock of Exhibitor Relations says that even in Los Angeles, the home of the movie industry, it took some time for theaters to return to the downtown core but it ultimately happened. "I think it's going to have to be done in Houston," he says. "There are a lot of moviegoers in the Houston area, obviously. Someone will make it work, whether that's Regal or AMC ... It needs to be top of the line ... and have all those great comfy seats and all those bells and whistles that we're now accustomed to as theatergoers. We want the best if we're going to go out and spend 20 bucks a pop." Star Cinema Grill's Ostrow says any moves in this direction were stymied by the pandemic over the last year but he, too, thinks the momentum is moving toward more development in central Houston. "I think there have been some upcoming developments that we think make sense and the developer thinks makes sense but COVID happened and all that went on hold for a minute," he says. "And if it's not us, it's going to be someone else. Of course, we'd like it to be us. This is our hometown ... We want to be there." "If the market is there, eventually a developer will detect it, and they will build some type of shopping center with a theater included," sums up Cinépolis CEO Olloqui. "It's a matter of time." cary.darling@chron.com

Why can't Houston get a new movie theater inside the Loop? The 'burbs got 'em.

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