Multiple factors are behind Cinema De Lux’s closure

Amazing as it may seem, back in 1990 Bristol had become something of a cinematic backwater, lagging way behind other cities of comparable size. Cinemagoing was booming but there weren’t enough cinemas in the city to meet the demand.

At times, this was simply embarrassing. The big hit of the year was Ghost, which locked up most of the screens. Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas didn’t open in Bristol until a full month after its national release, while Spike Lee’s Mo’Better Blues was postponed indefinitely. Paper Mask, which was actually filmed in Bristol and starred local hero Paul McGann, was shunted out to the Cannon Henleaze (now the Orpheus).

Bristol what’s on magazine Venue, for which I was Film Editor at the time, responded with a cover feature headlined ‘The Incredible Shrinking Choice’. What Bristol really needed was one of those new-fangled multiplex cinemas. But it took an awfully long time to get one.

In September 1994, the city’s Great and Good (and as many Venue lowlifes as could blag free tickets) traipsed off to an anonymous retail and leisure park round the back of Temple Meads to gaze in awe upon the magnificence of US company National Amusements’ new Showcase Cinema (a concrete block built on a marsh), which was briefly the largest multiplex in the country.

A glamorous, star-studded event attended by the woman with the squeaky voice from the Police Academy movies, this gala opening had as its centrepiece the premiere of Speed, starring Keanu Reeves, which certainly put the state-of-the-art surround sound system through its paces. This was the future, and it looked grand. Well, kind of.

Showcase Avonmeads’ “iconic” neon foyer – photo: Martin Booth

Bristol had been here before, of course. On opening back in 1966, the Mecca Leisure Centre (subsequently known as the New Bristol Centre) had been trumpeted as the future of city centre entertainment.

It originally boasted an amusement arcade, coffee bar, the Locarno ballroom (a filming location for the Beeb’s original Come Dancing and scene of many a legendary gig in its many incarnations, closing for good in 1991), an ice rink and banqueting rooms called the Mayfair Suite.

The cinema boasted the largest screen in Bristol (before it was chopped into two back in 1980) and state of the art 70mm projection equipment. This stunned the audience during the gala opening screening of Doctor Zhivago, attended by co-star Geraldine Chaplin, the lord mayor and the ten lovely winners of the Evening Post’s Charm Girl contest. Today, the building houses student accommodation and the O2 Academy music venue.

Nearly two decades on, in 1985, Bristol did it all again when the Odeon in Union Street reopened after much-needed refurbishment and investment with a gala premiere of the new Bond movie, A View to a Kill. Everyone was sitting in comfortable seats in a smoke-free auditorium watching a big screen with a fabulous sound system and, briefly, it seemed like the future was here.

The over-subscribed Bristol Showcase quickly became the highest grossing multiplex cinema in the UK. On December 11 1997, competition arrived in the form of the new 14 screen Cineworld in Hengrove Park. “Bristol is number two or three outside London in terms of box office grosses,” Bristol Cineworld manager Natasha Griffin told Venue, arguing that there was plenty of business for everyone.

Next to arrive in 1998 was the Warner Cribbs Causeway site. Venue wrongly predicted (after being tipped off by Warners) that the grand opening ceremony would be attended by Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, whose Lethal Weapon 4 opened that week. In fact, we got… nobody. “We couldn’t find anyone who was available,” admitted A Spokesman, sheepishly.

Warners subsequently opened a second Bristol site at Longwell Green. Both cinemas currently trade under the Vue banner.

An almost deserted Aspects Leisure Park in Longwell Green in November 2020 – photo: Martin Booth

Finally, Bristol’s fifth and most luxurious multiplex – the 13-screen, 2,800-seat Showcase Cinema De Lux in Cabot Circus – opened its doors on September 26 2008. Venue obtained industry figures which revealed that the city’s two Vue multiplexes, at Cribbs Causeway and Longwell Green, had the biggest market share (40 per cent and 27 per cent respectively), with the Avonmeads Showcase now trailing on 16 per cent and the Cineworld in Hengrove on 11 per cent.

A little more than two decades on from being the grandest cinema in town, the city centre Odeon now accounted for just six per cent of Bristol’s takings. This was thought to be the cinema most threatened by the arrival of the nearby Cinema De Lux, but it actually survived and thrived by aggressively cutting ticket prices while its rival traded on the ‘premium’ experience.

The news that the Cinema De Lux and Cineworld cinemas are both to close within a week of one another would appear to suggest that Bristol has now fallen out of love with the multiplex cinema. But multiple factors are involved. The Cineworld chain has been in financial difficulty for years and field for bankruptcy protection in the US earlier this year. Showcase has blamed failure to reach agreement over the terms of its lease for the closure of the Cinema De Lux.

The owners of Cabot Circus have said they are “committed to providing a cinema” at the shopping centre following the shock announcement that Cinema De Lux is closing – photo: Martin Booth

In addition, cinema attendance has been slow to recover after Covid and may continue to lag behind pre-pandemic levels for years to come. The cost of living crisis is having an effect upon attendance too, though this has also led to a decline in subscriptions to streaming services, which were seen by many as cinema’s main competitor.

Then there’s the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, which led to delays in several major productions, including Ridley Scott’s Gladiator sequel, but do not seem to have significantly impacted the superhero sausage machine that churns out increasingly mediocre comicbook adaptations on an almost weekly basis. On the other hand, let’s not forget that the year’s biggest box office hits, Barbie and Oppenheimer, were neither lazy sequels nor opportunistic franchise entries.

Finally, cinema evangelists are always eager to highlight the joys of the communal experience: laughing and crying with a group of strangers in a darkened room. But this can also have its off-putting downside – which is rarely addressed by operators of these giant barns – from gangs of feral seat-kicking children to teenagers and surly young adults making and receiving mobile phone calls during screenings, with few if any staff on hand to enforce reasonable standards of behaviour.

For some, the ‘premium’ experience of at-seat service is a major attraction; for others, being stuck next to someone loudly consuming a smelly three-course meal is the best available proof of Sartre’s contention that “hell is other people”.

Main photo: Martin Booth

Read next:

• City centre multiplex cinema to close
• Cabot Circus owners respond to shock cinema closure
• 15 places in Bristol that once were cinemas
• New independent cinema could open in Broadmead

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