Yellowknife’s Capitol Theatre will close for good on March 31, its general manager says. It had been losing money for years.
Chris Wood told Cabin Radio the theatre had been unable to reach terms on a new lease with McCor, which manages the downtown Precambrian Building in which the city’s only movie theatre is housed.
Listen: Chris Wood explain why the Capitol Theatre is closing. (You can also get this podcast another way.)
“A lot of it has to do with the way people’s viewing habits have changed since the pandemic,” Wood said.
“The theatre never really recovered from the Covid epidemic and then, when things did start to pick up, we were forced to evacuate for a few weeks,” he added, referring to Yellowknife’s 2023 wildfire-related evacuation, which came just weeks after the summer box office smash hits Barbie and Oppenheimer were released.
“Our lease is up,” said Wood, “and at this point, the landlord has shown no desire to renew it.”
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McCor, approached for comment, said it was working on a statement.
The nearest movie theatre to Yellowknife from April onward will be the Riverview Cineplex in Hay River, a town of 3,000 people about a five-hour drive to the south.
“For the last few years the theatre has not been profitable, and it astounds me that we were able to hold on as long as we have,” said Wood on Tuesday. He said he had been notified by his boss earlier in the week that the theatre was set to close.
Asked what would happen if some Yellowknife residents sought to keep it open, Wood said the situation was “well past that point.”
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‘We’re in the snack business’
The Capitol Theatre is not part of a major chain.
The Precambrian Building space – which holds three screens – is leased from McCor, Wood said, and the owner of the theatre company itself is based in Ontario, where it runs a series of drive-in movie theatres.
Last year, Yellowknives Dene First Nation development arm Det’on Cho said it had become a joint owner of the Precambrian Building. Det’on Cho has been approached for comment.
Wood moved to Yellowknife in 2008. “I was hired to come up here when they took over the lease,” he said, having previously worked in the theatre industry in the south.
“It’s not under any major corporation,” he said of the Capitol Theatre. “If it was, we’d all be wearing uniforms and things would look much more different than they do now.”
Efforts to renovate the building over the years were frustrated by various developments, he said, like the pandemic and the wildfires. (He acknowledged that the decor “screams 1970s.”)
Wood said most people don’t fully understand the economics behind running a movie theatre – and the small margins on which they are based.
“We’re not actually in the movie theatre business. We’re in the snack business,” he said.
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“We basically use the movies to draw you in to buy popcorn. That’s the whole purpose of a movie theatre. Distributors take a huge percentage of the box office … the only thing the theatre has any control over is the snack bar. The snack bar pays the rent, it pays the salaries, it pays the utilities.”
Without a theatre, Wood says he is “afraid of what it says” for Yellowknife.
“I’ve been in the business for three quarters of my life now. So it’s very sad to me, knowing I probably will never work in this industry again, especially not in this capacity,” he said.
“I’m worried about the future. The government has made promises over increased military spending and presence, but will that make up for a lot of the things that we have lost?
“I’m worried about families that move up here and the lack of amenities, especially entertainment, for those families.
“What are we going to do with the kids now? We’re going to park them in front of the TV with streaming. We’re going to have them look at their iPads all day and play video games. I don’t know.”
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