The old lady looks lost. Disoriented, even.
For 83-year-old Katherine O'Hare, all the clacking, chirping and hollering inside SilverCity Oakville, west of Toronto, is more than a distraction; it's an all-out invasion. "Who would want such a thing?" she mutters, pushing her walker past a store hawking T-shirts and DVDs. "Yuck," she says, struggling by a gourmet coffee bar. "Goodness," she mumbles, staring at a bar where exhausted-looking fathers down beer and watch golf on flat-screen TVs.
Normally, this is not O'Hare's kind of place. All she knows about this strange, echoing carnival is that she needs to find Theatre 7. The pimply young man she'd bought her $20 ticket from had said, "Down and to your left." But which left? The left that leads to something called the VIP Lounge? The left toward the pool tables? The left leading to a string of doors labelled "Party Room," whatever that is?
After many wrong turns, she limps toward yet another employee clad in the black-and-blue uniform of Cineplex Entertainment. "Where's the opera?" she demands.
Rather than snickering and telling the misguided old lady that this is no opera house, the usher points to a giant, neon "7." "Right there, ma'am. It starts in 10 minutes."
O'Hare nudges her walker toward the neon beacon. Within minutes, she finds a comfortable perch near dozens of other opera patrons her age—centre seat, right up front. Better than she could ever afford at the Lincoln Center. The lights dim. A fat man appears. The crashing opening lines of the Metropolitan Opera's live staging of Peter Grimes blasts all around her. O'Hare smiles. Here is an aural invasion she can handle.
Similar scenes have unfolded at theatres across the country this opera season, as tens of thousands of mostly grey-haired fans have waded through Cineplex lobbies to watch live feeds from the renowned New York opera house. This year, the Met will play at 80-plus Cineplex theatres across Canada, bringing world-class opera to every town with a population of more than 20,000—Madame Butterfly in Moose Jaw, La Bohème in Belleville, Placido in Prince Rupert. At the Scotiabank Theatre complex in downtown Toronto, these live feeds sell out multiple 550-seat theatres for each performance. After two seasons, the Sheppard Grande theatre in north Toronto has become one of the busiest opera venues in the world (the manager even puts out a wine-and-cheese spread). In Victoria, some patrons wear tuxedoes.
This is just one scene in a much larger story. It starts almost a decade ago, with the rise of DVDs and flat-screen TVs that equipped the average living room with all the sights and sounds of a real theatre, and accelerated with the advent of digital downloading. Suddenly, once-loyal customers were staying home to watch pirated versions of the latest Hollywood blockbusters—often before they were released in theatres. Box-office growth plunged (it's fallen from double digits to just 2% in five years). Pundits eulogized the industry. The end was nigh.
Or so it seemed. Hollywood narratives don't fizzle without some prospect of redemption, and the hero of this tale is Cineplex's Calcutta-born CEO, Ellis Jacob. Both here and abroad, he's known as the man who's not just reviving the flagging theatre industry but reinventing it. The average Cineplex—by far, Canada's largest chain, with more than 1,337 screens at 132 theatres nationwide—moonlights as sports emporium, rock concert venue, arcade, lecture hall, food court and, yes, opera house. In some cases, it's also a bowling alley, a watering hole, a billiards hall and a daycare centre—a cacophonous fusion of high and low culture. Cineplex's strategy is simple: to broaden its audience beyond the acne-and-Red-Bull crowd, and to fill its theatres all day, every day, squeezing every last buck out of each patron who walks through the door. At the same time, the chain is reducing its dependence on the uneven popularity of Hollywood flicks.
Ultimately, though, movies lie at the heart of Cineplex's business, and Jacob has invested heavily in enhancing the experience, building luxurious new theatres, installing versatile digital projectors and bracing for the next big thing in Hollywood (again): 3-D. He has also created a customer loyalty program, SCENE, that is the envy of the industry. It all adds up to one thing: Cineplex is defying the flat attendance numbers plaguing the rest of its peers. Last year, the company's box office receipts were up 6.5%, compared to 1.3% for the rest of Canadian exhibitors, and overall revenue—which includes concessions, ticket sales and its various other entertainment offerings—was up almost 5% in the last quarter, to $209 million.
