Real Estate: coming Soon to A Screen Near You - A Church Service?

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On Sunday, Senior Pastor Jeff Jones at Plano, Texas-based Chase Oaks Church delivered his weekly sermon. But not all of his 6,000 members sat within the pews of the main church.  Some 450 Chase Oaks parishioners watched Jones deliver his weekly message in the same seats that hours before were filled with audiences watching "The Black Panther" at the B&B Wylie 12 movie theater in Wylie, Texas. 

Welcome to the new world of the movie theater. 

Courtesy of Cineplex Entertainment A WorldGaming esports tournament, which is hosted at a Cineplex Entertainment movie theater in Canada. Movie theater chains have been expanding their services to include a wide range of uses, from services for startup churches to corporate events and video game tournaments. In doing so, theater operators are aiming to boost alternative streams of revenue away from just ticket and concession sales, experts say.  

For theaters, costs of doing business have only steepened in recent years, with taxes and labor costs going up. Plus, many theater chains have invested heavily in more luxury amenities, like cushioned reclining seats, improved food and beverages, higher-grade sound systems and digital projection. Add in the cost of distributing a film for Hollywood, and some theater chains are striving to find ways to grow revenue outside of movie ticket sales, New York University professor Bjorn Henson said. Henson is the clinical professor at the Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism at NYU. 

“Selling popcorn at $8 a gallon isn't enough,” Henson said. “These businesses [are] certainly looking for opportunities to improve economics.” While movie theaters in both the U.S. and Canada have seen gross ticket sales increase since 2000, in recent years, theaters have seen box office grosses falter as a result of increased competition from streaming services like Netflix. Gross box office revenues shrank in 2017 to just over $11B, from $11.38B in 2016, according to data compiled by Statista. It did not help that Hollywood produced a number of box office flops in 2017, such as “Baywatch” and “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” Variety reports. 

But a bigger shift has also taken place in the industry, with Netflix debuting first-run movies on its streaming service versus planting them in theaters. “It’s not a sea change, it’s a tsunami,” Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock told Variety in December. “The tide has moved against movies. They used to be the hub of what entertainment is, but that core has shifted to streaming and television. Back in the day people talked about ‘Back to the Future’ or ‘E.T.’ when they talked about entertainment. Today, it’s ‘Stranger Things’ or ‘Game of Thrones.'”