"The industry is still overscreened, but they've come a long way in cleaning up their act," says one analyst quoted in a New York Times story on the current state of the movie-theater business. The exhibition industry is "a cash cow," says another.

It's not so many years since every article you read about the state of exhibition was a sob story detailing the overexpansion that drove much of the industry into bankruptcy in the late 1990s. I always responded cynically to this state of affairs. After all, if exhibitors hadn't spent so much of the 1980s and even the early 1990s building crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel theaters, they wouldn't be in a position where competition (from new multiplexes with stadium seating and digital sound systems) forced them to build entirely new ones. I remember seeing The Frighteners in mono at a local first-run multiplex. This was in 1996. There was no excuse for that.

Anyway, to hear the Times tell the story, it's fat times again for movie theaters -- at least the mammoth Regal chain, which snatched up the United Artists and Edwards Cinemas chains. The bucks are rolling in partly due to new marketing strategies, like the 20 minutes of limp programming (really an excuse to show ads) that precedes screenings at Regal-owned theaters or the practice of attaching actual promotional CDs to drink cups and the like. As long as this is perceived as a solid strategy -- as advertisers worry about TiVo-owning home viewers skipping past (or simply using the john during) commercial breaks, the captive audience at the local cineplex looks more and more attractive -- expect the movie-theater experience to become more and more commercialized.

Cash cow indeed. I paid 10 bucks for this?

In Manhattan, the moviegoing situation has improved steadily since the mid 1990s. At one time, you might have no good options for seeing a big Hollywood commercial release in the Village, but the arrival of the UA 14-screen plex on 14th Street helped change that. The reign of the Angelika has even been challenged by the arrival of the five-screen Sunshine Cinema, a terrific place to see a movie, just a few blocks east on Houston. (They're even programming a midnight film series, so if you've been waiting to see The Goonies or Barbarella on the big screen, well, get in line.)

Sadly, outfits like The Quad, Cinema Village, and Film Forum -- all of them vital to the New York film scene -- don't have the bucks (or the space) for stadium-style makeovers. At Cinema Village a few years ago, "renovation" meant carving up the old auditorium into three pieces, a welcome move only in that it offers up two more screens for programming, keeping smaller movies in town a week or two longer. Whenever I'm on the west coast, I try to take advantage of the opportunity to check out the programming at grand old venues like The Castro in San Francisco and the Egyptian Theatre, run by the American Cinematheque, in Hollywood. It's one thing to see something like Pirates of the Caribbean at Mann's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. It's quite another, even finer thing, to see a Seijun Suzuki movie thrown onto the big screen at the Egyptian right across the street.

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