Driving through Maryland, you might come across an iconic sight: a neon-lined, art deco facade standing out amongst mundane downtown storefronts. The posters flanking its double-wide doors aren’t showing the familiar blockbusters of the day – they’re advertising indie circuit flicks and 35mm prints dug out from basement boxes.
It’s an independent movie theater, part of a group of cinematic safe havens beating the national trends of declining theatrical profits.
Since a wave of pandemic-era theater closures that began five years ago, the United States has lost nearly 5,000 theater screens, about 12% of the pre-pandemic footprint. Over half went dark between 2022 and 2023, the worst single-year slump in at least 30 years. Simultaneously, streaming services soared in popularity while traditional film studios were forced to delay theatrical content on the release calendar, or abandon exclusive theatrical releases.
Even when theaters reopened as lockdown restrictions loosened, national ticket sales failed to recover. In 2024, cinemas only sold about two-thirds of the number of tickets they did in 2019. Average ticket prices have risen from $9.16 in 2019 to $11.31 last year, but that hasn’t been enough to offset shrinking attendance.
Despite this industry-wide decline, many of Maryland’s independent theaters have survived.
Unlike major theater chains, like Cinemark, Regal or AMC, independent theaters have the freedom to mix up their programming slate and show older, limited release or rare films. Those showings, which are labeled as repertory films, are powering the independent theater industry, said Todd Hitchcock, executive director of the AFI Silver Theatre and Culture Center.
“We saw much quicker, stronger return for our repertory programming,” Hitchcock said. “That just speaks to the unique value proposition of those [films] and the dedicated cinephile showing up.”
Hitchcock runs one of many iconic film venues across the state, a list that includes Baltimore’s Senator Theater, Charles Theater and the 110-year-old Parkway Theatre, as well as the Frostburg Palace Cinema, Greenbelt Cinema and Bengies Drive-In Theater, which boasts America’s largest theater screen.
Each theater features programming that differs from the traditional first-run exhibition model. The AFI Silver Theater is well known for its various festivals, like the AFI European Union Film Showcase and AFI Latin American Film Festival, which reached record high attendance last year.
This diversification is out of necessity. Outside of exclusive 70mm presentations, like those of The Brutalist and Oppenheimer, Hitchcock said that many first-run releases have faltered.
“A film that 10 years ago might have played eight weeks here is only playing four weeks,” Hitchcock said. “For the right film, people are clearly both getting the awareness and the motivation to see it while we have it on screen, but it’s not applied consistently across the board with everything that’s coming out.”
It doesn’t help that the pandemic accelerated the gradual decline of major studio releases. In 2024, major studios released a little over half the number of films they did at their 30-year peak in 2006. Minor studios’ outputs have boomed, but those films typically release fewer theaters and collect lower grosses. To make matters worse, prolonged Writer’s Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild strikes in 2023 halted an already disrupted film production schedule.
At Greenbelt Cinema, admissions at the theater have fallen about 50% since the pandemic, executive director Caitlin McGrath said.
“It’s not a great time to be running a movie theater,” McGrath said. “It means that we have to shift the pieces of the pie so we are just working more on our contributed streams of revenue versus earned.”
For the non-profit Greenbelt Cinema, that means relying less on concessions and ticket sales and relying more on donations and grants. It also means diversified programing, to a further extent than many other independent theaters across the state. Greenbelt Cinema has shown special events like the U.S. presidential debate and added engagement-focused screenings, like a dance documentary paired with a Q&A and workshop with the film’s subject and director.
McGrath wants to offer moviegoers an experience that’s different from what they can find on streaming services or at larger theater chains. Although Greenbelt Cinema’s recovery is far from complete, the theater remains open, a better fate than other exhibitors have faced, most notably Washington’s famed E Street Cinema earlier this month.
In fiscal year 2024, the AFI Silver Theater reported attendance comparable to pre-pandemic levels, but Hitchcock stressed that without a significant amount of films in the release pipeline, the theater’s recovery – and the recovery of other independent theaters in the region – could be short-lived.
“It’s not like we get all the way back and then everything is permanently fixed,” Hitchcock said. “There’s still ups and downs.”