As of Monday, September 5, Portland’s Regal Broadway Metroplex will be closed, says Richard Grover, director of marketing and communications for Regal Entertainment Group. Speaking from the company’s headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee, Grover confirmed the recent rumors that’ve been floating around Portland’s film scene, adding that during one of Regal’s “periodic reviews,” the Broadway was marked as one of the company’s “under-performing locations.”
I’ve always liked the Broadway—for a chain theater, it’s always felt pretty unique (it’s underground!), plus they’ve been known to host occasional indie and repertory screenings, and whenever I see anything there, it’s never busy (so maybe that’s where the “under-performing” part comes in). I’ll be sad to see it go, and I’m guessing I won’t be alone.
Grover went on to note that thanks to the number of screens already in downtown Portland—including those at two other Regal locations, the Fox Tower 10 and the Pioneer Place Stadium 6, as well as those at the Living Room Theaters—Regal has no plans to open another theater to replace the Broadway. Grover was unable to say whether employees at the Broadway had been offered positions at other Regal locations, or how the Broadway’s closure might affect the Northwest Film Center’s annual Portland International Film Festival, which has used the theater as one of its major venues for a number of years.
“We actually didn’t know that the Regal Broadway was closing,” says Jessica Lyness, the marketing manager for the Northwest Film Center. “But our sense is that location always struggled, and that while it was partly goodwill for [Regal] to host as a venue [for] the Portland International Film Festival, they also needed that revenue and those audiences coming through the door.”
“We’ve been using the Regal Broadway for over a dozen years,” Lyness continues. “If it’s no longer available, maybe we’ll use the Regal in the Pioneer Place. One year we used the Fox Tower; last year we started expanding over to the south side [of the city]. We’ll always find a home for the Portland International Film Festival.”
There’s also a possibility that one less Regal will change where films are booked elsewhere in Portland. In the past, Regal’s usually booked artsier fare at the Fox Tower 10, with more commercial films playing at the Pioneer and the Broadway. With the Broadway soon to be out of the picture, bookings at the Fox Tower and the Pioneer could shift to compensate—which means different types of films might end up showing at theaters like Cinema 21, the Living Room Theaters, and the Hollywood Theatre. Like the recent shift in programming at the Hollywood, we’ll see how it shakes out over the next few months.
A few other Regal theaters have closed recently, like the Regal Cinema Port Orange 6 in Daytona Beach, Florida; the Saucon Valley Square 10 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and the Miracle 5 in Tallahassee, Florida.
Well, I could have seen this coming. Broadway was always the “b-movie” theater of the Portalnd Regal branch, playing the stuff that wasn’t worth clearing a spot for at the Pioneer OR giving an extra screen to those that were too popular for the Pioneer.
It’s a shame they didn’t follow up on their reputation as the “funky, little brother”. The PIFF screenings and that one summer partnership with Floating World Comics (Pink Flamingos, Annie Hall, Psycho, Royal Tanenbaums, etc.) were the sort of thing they should have built on. Instead, they just dropped them, and I really saw no reason to go there outside of PIFF that last two years. They were never going to be as classy as the Fox, nor as junk-food-populist as the Pioneer, so they needed to carve out their own niche. Failing that, it was just bland, and this is what happens.
With that said, it’s always difficult to feel sorry for a Regal theater. Here’s hoping something worthwhile happens with the space (maybe the NW Film Center could finally move out of the Art Museum basement and back into a real theater).
I totally agree that this place had a lot of potential, and Regal just failed to do anything with it. It always had an identity crisis trying to compete with the art house, multiplex, and second run theaters within walking distance of it.
It had something going for it when it was the cheapest first-run theater in town, but even that didn’t last and since it’s just been the theater that plays stuff that isn’t popular enough for Pioneer Place. It’s a shame, because I too thought it was a cool spot.
Well, six months down the line, I still miss this theater. I liked the atmosphere a lot and saw a lot of great films there. It’s sad that it’s in mothballs. I’m still hoping someone will come along and revive it, although admittedly, finding a unique niche will be difficult with alternative theaters like Living Room and Cinema 21 nearby.