In July this year, Dunedin's Hoyts Octagon shut down. Failure to "negotiate favourable lease terms". It'll be replaced by a Reading Cinemas next year.
I arrived in Dunedin in January after five years in Wellington, so I didn't have time to build the emotional attachment to Hoyts Octagon that a lot of my friends seemed to have (there were lots of sad links to an Otago Daily Times article on Facebook).
The building itself is pretty much a grey shell now. Left to pick up after it is the six-screen Rialto Cinema and the Metro, a cinema targeted at people who wield their Supergold cards like a weapon.
Fast forward to present day. Carrie's coming out. It's apparently not particularly good but Kimberley Pierce is directing it and she's a pretty interesting filmmaker.
So, why not? I boot up the Rialto website.
It's not showing.
This isn't the first time this has happened with a film I've been interested in. Michael Bay's Pain and Gain barely hit the screen before Hoyts shut down, while Riddick skipped us by without a word.
Don't get me wrong, it's also kept some terrible-looking films from getting Dunedin money – Grown-Ups 2, Delivery Man, Kick-Ass 2, We're The Millers – but I'd be willing to make that trade if I could get access to Carrie now, or to Insidious Chapter Two in a week.
This isn't a familiar feeling, this sense of missing out, because cinema ecosystems in large centres don't normally suffer the restrictions of the smaller centres. In places like Taupo, Invercargill and Nelson, you have to resign yourself to a single multiplex servicing an entire town's tastes; meanwhile, in even tinier towns like Taihape, Pahiatua or Picton, you're locked into an endless cycle of children's flicks and films that play well to the elderly set.
But there's something to be said for the clear differentiation of audiences that goes on in the larger ecosystems. A different kind of audience goes to Hoyts, than the kind that goes to Rialto, than the kind that goes to Metro. The sudden imposition of a smaller town's structure on a large centre has led to fewer films and shorter seasons.
Sure, there's probably a number of reasons why films like Stoker and Blancanieves and Frances Ha have been getting getting shorter seasons with fewer evening sessions, but the absence of Hoyts is a factor. Planes, Smurfs 2 and Jackass: Bad Grandpa aren't exactly Rialto's wheelhouse.
And so one audience, a particularly big audience, starts to bleed into another, smaller audience, an audience whose cinema doesn't have the capacity to fully cater to both at once.
That has an impact on everyone's ability to see what they want when they can, the sucker who wants Kick-Ass 2 and the snob who wants Blancanieves – though it arguably hurts the snob worse, because their kind was less profitable anyway. Seeing non-mainstream cinema has become more of a gamble, time-wise and distribution-wise.
I never thought I'd write this, but I can't wait for Readings to arrive.
