Coming soon to an NYC neighborhood near you is a new kind of movie theater. Specifically, one that serves booze and gourmet food.
Movie houses with drinking and dining options, including the Florida-based iPic, the Texas-based Alamo Drafthouse and Williamsburg’s Nitehawk, are gearing up to expand throughout the city.
“Our research showed 78 percent of people eat before or after going to the movies,” said iPic president and CEO Hamid Hashemi. The idea of combining dining, drinking and cinema options is yet another way to lure movie-goers away from their Netflix accounts.
Late last year it was announced that iPic, a luxe movie chain with eight theaters across the country, was opening a 46,000-square-foot, eight-screen auditorium at 11 Fulton St. at the South Street Seaport in 2015. The theater promises waiter service (at iPic the waiters are called “ninjas” who stealthily leave your food and drink orders during the show), as well as leather chairs, some of which fully recline and come with blankets.
But, it turns out, this downtown theater is the tip of the iceberg as far as iPic’s New York designs go.
Faith Hope Consolo of Douglas Elliman noted that iPic is looking to expand throughout the city: “They’re looking in Long Island City where there’s [few movie options]; they’re looking in Downtown Brooklyn; they’re looking in [other parts of] Queens and Upper Manhattan. Manhattan proper has a lot of theaters, but upper Manhattan does not. It would be a great addition to the Harlem landscape.”
According to Hashemi, “There are three other sites in New York that we’re working on.”
Already scheduled for 2015 is a 541-seat iPic theater in Fort Lee, NJ. And if iPic lands a spot in Brooklyn, they’re going to find competition from Alamo Drafthouse.
Alamo, which also serves a full menu of food and beverage, inked a deal to open in City Point, the 1 million-square-foot retail outlet that’s debuting sometime next year in Downtown Brooklyn.
“We’re going to be on the top floor,” said Tim League, founder and CEO of Alamo. “It’ll be 800 seats.”
And Alamo has already struck the New York market with a six-screen, 550-seat theater that they opened last August in Yonkers. “The neighborhood has been reacting well,” said League. “There’s always challenges, but so far so good. We had a really nice holiday season and attendance has been up.”
League says that he’s currently on the lookout for more Alamo spots in Manhattan — although one deal that Alamo had in the works to take over the Metro theater on the Upper West Side fell through.
The pioneer of this movie/dining/drinking trend in NYC was the Nitehawk Cinema, which opened in 2011. It offered atypical cinema fare (fried calamari, meatballs), as well as handcrafted cocktails. (Many of the dishes and cocktails complement the movies being screened — like blue cheese fondue and Blue Point winter ale to go with a screening of “Blue is the Warmest Color.”)
The Nitehawk helped rewrite the laws that had been on the books forbidding alcohol in movie theaters.
“We met a lobbyist who thought it was a good idea,” said Matthew Viragh, the founder, executive director of the Nitehawk. “He drummed up a lot of support, and they were able to change the law. In August of 2011 Governor Cuomo signed it.”
The change might help explain why there is a sudden explosion in these sorts of venues. Nitehawk is also — surprise, surprise! — on the lookout for new venues.
“We’re very interested in other neighborhoods in New York,” said Viragh. “Our goal for the next year or two is to identify areas of expansion . . . we are actively searching in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens — all over.”
Certainly, this is a happy turn of events for moviegoers.
“Revenue has been dropping” industry-wide, said iPic’s Hashemi. “We have to come up with new ways of getting people to the theater.”
“As people get more and more access to movies at home, the response to that is to make the movies more like home — with things like better food,” said Viragh.
“The idea of adding food and drink makes for an efficient night out,” added League. “At a higher level, it makes the experience really fun — it becomes a celebration of movies.”