What to do with the Old Town Warren Theatre, now that Regal’s shutting it down? | Opinion

The news of the week is that the Warren Old Town Theatre will shut down Thursday night after a one-day opening and closing run of the new movies “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”

I wish I could say I’m surprised.

The theater, built as the anchor and crown jewel of City Hall’s Old Town redevelopment district, has been on a steady decline since Regal Theaters bought it six years ago.

The Eagle newsroom shares a parking garage with the cinema and I walk past it twice a day, five days a week. The last movie I saw there was “Moonfall” in February of 2022. It was an exercise in sci-fi silliness, but it had Halle Berry in it.

Because I went after work and didn’t have time to eat before the show, I decided to take advantage of the service-at-your-seat option. It was the worst meal I’ve had since February of 2022.

I ordered a hot dog and fries, and it was pricey. The hot dog had been cooking so long that it was like a Slim Jim on a bun; the fries were cold and hard.

There were other customers, but the place had a feel of abandonment, with stained and sticky carpet, spilled popcorn and discarded napkins on the floor, and employees milling about like underpaid extras in a zombie flick.

It wasn’t always thus.

When the theater opened in 2005, it was a shining star of Wichita’s entertainment scene, and “ushered in a new entertainment era” for the city, according to Eagle movie critic Bob Curtright.

Waiters delivered restaurant-quality meals to the theater seats and there was even an attached sports bar and grill, “Oscars,” where Eagle reporters and others used to watch sports on the big screen at lunch and after work.

There was only one problem. The theater didn’t make any money.

Despite numerous red flags and industry trends showing downtown theaters weren’t doing well, City Hall was determined to have one.

The City Council put $9.5 million into assembling the land, building a parking garage to make the project possible, and developing an open-air plaza with a splash pad for the kiddies.

The money was borrowed against future property tax income from the development. If there’s any good news here, it’s that after almost a quarter century, the Tax Increment Finance District has managed to pay its original debts and is scheduled to end this year.

In 2009, the city propped up the theater again with a $6 million loan. That project closed the sports bar and brought in digital projectors, which were rapidly replacing physical film.

The original owner, Bill Warren, sold all of his Wichita theaters to Regal in 2017. At the time, those five theaters represented a monopoly on sit-down cinema in the city.

The first to fail, in 2018, was the west-side Palace Theatre, which showed second run-films at discount prices. It was torn down to make way for a Cracker Barrel restaurant, cutting the number of different movies playing in Wichita at any given time by about half.

The second domino was the Movie Machine at Towne West, a discount first-run theater which shut down during the pandemic and didn’t come back.

That space has since become the Boulevard Theatre, which isn’t as fancy, but is cleaner and better run than the two remaining Regal Warrens on the east and west sides of town.

My wife and I saw three movies at the Boulevard in the last week — “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Mission Impossible, Dead Reckoning,” and “Elemental.” We got tickets, a big tub of popcorn and drinks for less than it costs for just tickets to the Regal.

Meanwhile, Cineworld Group, Regal’s parent company, declared bankruptcy last year to get out from under $4.5 billion of amassed debt. The company is emerging from bankruptcy this month.

In a buzzword-laced statement, the company’s CEO, Mooky Greidinger, promised “the most immersive and cutting-edge cinema experiences that make us the ‘Best Place to Watch a Movie.’”

Mooky, you got your work cut out for you.

So does City Hall, because the entire cinema plaza ain’t what it used to be.

Since the city redeveloped Naftzger Park, which had long been a haven for the homeless, many of them migrated to the plaza. They take showers in the splash pad and sleep in the garage.

The garage elevator is currently out of service, its glass wall criss-crossed with duct tape after being shot out by revelers for the second time this year.

Is there such a thing as re-redevelopment? Because if there is, this part of town could sure use it.

A good place to start would be with the people running the Boulevard Theater, to see if they have any interest in expanding downtown. They seem to have a knack for cleaning up after Regal.

Or the city could repurpose the theater as a homeless shelter. It’s already got a full-service kitchen and hundreds of reclining seats that are comfortable for sleeping in.

Either way, it would be an improvement.