Soyi­ni Grey

COVID-19 was the fi­nal nail in the Movi­eTowne Ch­agua­nas cof­fin. Chair­man Derek Chin said the mar­ket in Cen­tral Trinidad was chang­ing, and peo­ple there were less at­tract­ed to the cin­e­ma-go­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. How­ev­er, he said they have not giv­en up on the area and were ac­tive­ly look­ing at ex­ist­ing malls and up­com­ing de­vel­op­ments for a pos­si­ble re­turn. But as of yes­ter­day, it was cur­tains for their Price Plaza lo­ca­tion, and re­moval of fix­tures had al­ready be­gun.

“I don’t feel guilty. I tried my best and it didn’t work out,” Chin said.

He says af­ter the com­pa­ny’s de­ci­sion last month to close their mul­ti­plex in Price Plaza Ch­agua­nas, the land­lords reached out to ne­go­ti­ate. Af­ter sev­er­al meet­ings, the ex­changes of pro­pos­als and counter-ar­gu­ments, and even sev­er­al in-per­son meet­ings, no deal could be made.

A moving truck parked outside MovieTowne, Chaguanas, yesterday, as items were being removed from the theatre.

SHASTRI BOODAN

Chin had de­scribed his land­lords as un­rea­son­able in the past. How­ev­er, his por­tray­al of them is more nu­anced. En­deav­our Hold­ings Ltd (EHL) is a pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­ny. It is the re­al es­tate in­vest­ment com­pa­ny that forms part of JMMB In­vest­ments.

Chin said ul­ti­mate­ly EHL could not grant Movi­eTowne, Ch­agua­nas the lev­el of con­ces­sions it would need to re­main vi­able. The de­ci­sion to close, he says, could not have been avoid­ed.

He says the mar­ket in Ch­agua­nas was both sat­u­rat­ed and shrink­ing. There were al­so is­sues with the lo­ca­tion it­self. Price Plaza is no longer the on­ly mall in the area, and even then, get­ting to the mall, and there­fore the cin­e­ma is not what it once was.

“Ac­cess to the mall is a prob­lem,” he said.

Chin said crime re­mains a threat to their busi­ness and with the avail­abil­i­ty of stream­ing ser­vices like Net­flix and Dis­ney Plus, cus­tomers now have less in­cen­tive to leave home to watch a movie.

The pub­lic health mea­sures im­ple­ment­ed by the gov­ern­ment to re­duce the spread of the COVID-19 virus has al­so had an im­pact on his re­main­ing busi­ness.

MovieTowne owner Derek Chin.

Movi­eTowne has 2,400 seats and un­der the gov­ern­ments 50 per cent re­stric­tion for cin­e­mas, they can sell 1,200 movie tick­ets. How­ev­er, Chin said their dai­ly av­er­age is now 110 movie tick­ets. Be­fore the virus and the lock­down mea­sures, it was 500 on a bad day. On Thurs­day 139 peo­ple paid to watch a movie in the cin­e­ma.

Chin said news of a vac­cine is promis­ing as it sig­nals the end of the glob­al pan­dem­ic. He ex­pects that in the new year Hol­ly­wood will start re­leas­ing new and ex­cit­ing movies that can on­ly be seen in cin­e­mas.

While the cur­tain may have closed on Movi­eTowne Ch­agua­nas, the group’s chair­man re­mains con­fi­dent in the en­ter­tain­ment sec­tor and the re­newed vi­a­bil­i­ty of the sec­tor in a post-COVID world.