Monday Business Roundup

Local Moviegoers Await Theater Opening

By Richard Martin, 7-23-07

For years analysts have considered the movie-theater business overbuilt, as evidenced by the closing of cineplexes across the West that were built in the small-box cinema boom of the 1980s. Try telling that to Boulder residents, though, who have exactly one aging four-screen theater in a town of more than 100,000 and who have been forced to drive south to the Colony Square and Flatirons megaplexes to get a decent choice of new releases.

That will change, finally, in August when the 16-screen movie theater at Boulder’s Twenty Ninth Street mall will light up after multiple delays, nearly a year after its original scheduled opening.

The theater was delayed by a change of ownership, when Century Theatres was bought out by Cinemark USA Inc. As it happens, Cinemark USA is one of the parterns in Centennial-based National CineMedia, a digital theater-ads company that beams pre-movie programming via satellite to around 12,000 theaters nationwide. While benefiting from new-theater construction, National CineMedia is also moving into a new line of business: digital programming for health clubs.

In other business news:

-- If you haven’t seen Michael Moore’s Sicko, there’s another drama unfolding locally that spotlights the gaping holes and massive immorality of the American health care system. Westword reporter Alan Prendergast documents the tangled relationship of personal-injury firm Mintz Law Firm and Spine and Injury Centers. What began as an effort to help accident victims who’d suffered trauma but were unable to procure insurance-company payments (and to make money in the process) devolved into a nasty legal dispute and charges of criminal activity.

-- The Coalition for Equal Rights, an organization against smoking regulations, says that more than 50 Colorado businesses have closed since Colorado’s statewide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants became law just over a year ago. Well, yeah, and how many new ones have opened? How many eateries and nightspots typically close in a 12-month span? As the Aurora Sentinel reports, “No solid data suggests a direct connection between the smoking ban and lower restaurant and bar sales.” This is one of those cooked-up statistics that lack meaning unless, of course, you’re a restaurant owner seeing your business decline and searching for a scapegoat.

-- Meanwhile, business has hardly suffered in the formerly smoke-filled casinos of Cripple Creek. Some $2.6 billion in wages flows into the casino owners’ pockets every years, translating into a $16 million budget for the town, huge for a town of Cripple Creek’s size. Like the other two historic gaming towns in Colorado, Central City and Black Hawk, Cripple Creek is in the enviable but not easy position of deciding how to best make use of the windfall. 

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