Lights, camera, action

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If you’re fortunate enough to live in a town or city where there’s a Picturehouse, you’ll know that watching a film there is about much more than settling down to see the latest blockbuster, clutching a bucket of tasteless popcorn and nursing an outsize Coke. 

Picturehouse shows the blockbusters, of course, but you’re equally likely to catch arthouse films or live screenings of opera, ballet and theatre. There are showings aimed at older cinemagoers (‘Silver Screen’), parents with babies (‘Big Scream’) and people with autism, and the group sells more wine than popcorn, thanks to its café-bars and restaurants offering freshly cooked – often locally sourced – food. 

But it is the buildings that are perhaps the biggest differentiator between Picturehouse cinemas and their multiplex rivals. Indeed, it is managing director Lyn Goleby’s passion for preserving important buildings and sustaining vibrant city-centre cultures that has driven the expansion of the business since she and the company’s co-founder, Tony Jones, rescued and refurbished their first cinema – the Phoenix, in Oxford – in 1989. 

Centres of community

“In the 1980s, everything was about developing greenfield sites on the outskirts of cities, and I had a very deep personal disapproval of that,” recalls Goleby. “I thought urban planning was going the wrong way, and I disliked the whole car-based culture that was beginning to come in as the multiplexes sprang up. 

“We thought cinemas, as buildings and centres of community, were terribly important – and that drove us to save things such as the Duke of York’s, in Brighton [the UK’s oldest purpose-built cinema, opened in 1910 ]; to take the Phoenix [built in 1913 ] to a different place; and to create things like the Clapham Picturehouse [the company’s first new-build cinema, in 1992 ], which has been a major contributor to the regeneration of the area. 

“I remember being mocked quite roundly by some of the early multiplex operators for my belief that ‘the future of cinema was the Clapham Picturehouse’.”

With 23 Picturehouse cinemas in the collection (Goleby eschews the word ‘chain’ because every cinema is unique), plans to open at least one every year for the foreseeable future, and healthy growth in admissions and turnover, does she feel vindicated? “Well, yes, but only in a small way, because the marketplace is dominated by the three major multiplexes – Cineworld, Odeon and Vue – which have nearly 75% of the market. The multiplex model works.”

But the Picturehouse model works too, because it is different. Both models had their genesis in a post-recession era. “All the stories in those days were about ‘the death of the British film industry’, ‘the death of arthouse’; it was not necessarily an easy place to be,” says Goleby. “The golden age of screen was in the 1950s, and it was all downhill from there. The way cinema fought against that was to reinvent the experience; the multiplexes did it one way and we did it in another, fluffing our feathers against them.”

The two now happily co-exist – to the point where Picturehouse operates (largely) contentedly – and autonomously – under the wing of Cineworld, which bought it in 2012 for £47.3m. So what is the essence of Picturehouse Cinemas, and who is its target audience? 

Its first cinemas opened in university towns – Oxford, Cambridge, York, Edinburgh, Brighton – which offers a clue, but Goleby dislikes descriptors such as ‘niche’, ‘boutique’ and ‘style’ because of their connotations of exclusivity and elitism. “We have built a very diverse and eclectic group of cinemas, with the common thread being that they are embedded in their local communities,” she says. “We try to create spaces where people from all walks of life feel comfortable and not excluded in any way. What I hope we are is ‘determinedly democratic’ – ‘community cinema’, if you like.”

And the cinemas are constantly evolving. While the first ones deliberately targeted “students and the sort of people who live in and around university cities”, this audience is no longer a given. “You can’t just stick on late nights and expect people to come – whereas, when I was at university, the late-night screenings were full of students,” Goleby recalls. 

Picturehouse offers late-night screenings as one-off events these days, when it can justify the marketing muscle and social media push required to get people to turn up. While many older people consciously choose to go to a Picturehouse cinema, Goleby admits that online developments such as Netflix and Amazon Prime mean “younger people are harder to capture now”.

Other innovations, however, have proved increasingly fruitful. Picturehouse pioneered ‘event cinema’ in 2006 with its live screenings of The Secret Policeman’s Ball, a long-running series of benefit shows featuring leading comedians, that raised funds for human rights organisation Amnesty International. The same year, it introduced live screenings from the New York Metropolitan Opera. 

It now regularly screens one-off cultural events – from the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Bolshoi Ballet and the V&A at one end, to Monty Python at the other – and distributes them to other cinemas across the world. 

Event cinema accounts for around 20% of Picturehouse’s ticket revenue. “Interestingly, people will choose to watch things at the cinema that they could be watching, free, on their televisions at home,” says Goleby. “For example, the Dr Who 50th anniversary special [The Day of the Doctor] in November 2013 was broadcast simultaneously in cinemas and on BBC1, and we got capacity audiences.” 

Audience data

Another Picturehouse innovation is membership, which, says Goleby, is “absolutely core to what we do”. Membership defrays the cost of tickets, encourages higher spend, and fosters “a huge sense of ownership”. Members visit the cinema six to seven times a year on average, compared with the national average of two and a half times. 

“We have some who come to our cinemas 80, 90, 100 times a year,” Goleby adds. “There was somebody in the early days of Cinema City, in Norwich – which we set up in 2007 – whom I thought must be living there. It was extraordinary. 

“At that stage, we could track people’s food and beverage consumption, the number of screenings they watched, and so on.” Unfortunately, this granular audience data has fallen victim, at least temporarily, to the Cineworld takeover. 

“We used to do an enormous amount of data analytics,” recalls Goleby. “We had a system that collected everything and allowed very targeted marketing. Being part of a bigger group meant we had to change our ticketing system, and that has meant the new journey towards really deep connection with our customers is only just under way.” Ironically, this has been delayed by too much research; during the Cineworld takeover, the Competition Commission dug deeply to understand the difference between the Picturehouse approach to cinema and the multiplex approach. “They drove us to conduct multiple customer surveys within the space of a few months, to the point where it became intrusive,” says Goleby. “Our customers got so fed up with it that we stood back from too much deep marketing interaction for a little while. We’ll have to be quite careful what we do next.”

Goleby trained as a solicitor, but quickly monetised her long-time interest in film by joining production company Goldcrest as a business development executive. She was there for what she calls “the glory years” – which spawned successes such as Chariots of Fire and The Mission – and for “the spectacular fall”, when hubris led to a series of box-office flops. Being “junior enough not to cop any of the flak and senior enough to see what was going on,” Goleby learned from both phases. She then joined British Screen Finance, the publicly-funded entity that bankrolled British films before it was folded into the UK Film Council. 

The move into Picturehouses came when Tony Jones, a veteran of independent cinema, approached her for help with funding the project in Oxford – “we put that finance together as a patchwork of funding, in much the same way as we were putting together the funding for films”.

That patchwork approach to funding lasted for the best part of 25 years, and the reason Goleby sought a takeover was that she “genuinely didn’t want to keep project funding each cinema”. It was, she says, exhausting. “It’s hard enough to find a site and build a cinema on it, but then you have to scramble around and find the money. Each time you are reinventing the wheel.”

Venture capitalists were involved for many years, but given their constant eye on the exit, Goleby felt she had to deliver to them too. “Close Brothers, which became Albion, stayed with us for more than 11 years, which is a long journey for a venture capitalist. I think it was a good journey for everybody, but it wasn’t going to last forever.”

An industry buyer was the obvious alternative, and the fit with Cineworld was the best of the three contenders, given its broad choice of films and ‘film values’. The dynamics of working as part of a larger organisation, however autonomously, are different. “But the capital flows – which have allowed us to expand – making it all worthwhile,” she says.

West End flagship

Picturehouse opened three new cinemas in London last year, including in East Dulwich and Crouch End. The third, Picturehouse Central, just off Leicester Square, was an old Cineworld property. “We’ve wanted a West End flagship forever, and we completely reinvented that cinema with the help of a very substantial investment from Cineworld,” Goleby says. Picturehouse Central hosted Sundance London, a spin-off from the Utah-based festival, in June.

Cinemas will also open in Durham this year, West Norwood next and Ealing in 2018. There’s a strong pipeline all over England, but Goleby clearly has designs on certain European capitals too. The main criteria for selecting sites are “the numbers of chimney pots and the demographic”, she says. “We pace the streets as much as we do the desktop. Getting a feel for what will be a good site is really important, and we use desktop analysis, through CACI, as reinforcement.”

But Picturehouse is seeking growth from its existing cinemas too, and it recently embarked on a project looking at how to make the facilities more family friendly. Although cinema has proved relatively recession-proof – “particularly for a couple, a night at the cinema is pretty good value for money” – Goleby admits that the cost of a family ticket can be a barrier. “So we are focusing hard on pricing and what you can get for your money in terms of confectionery.”

It is also developing child-friendly initiatives designed to educate a new generation in the joys of going to the cinema. “Things such as end-of-term treats and school trips – particularly for children in neighbourhoods where going to the cinema wouldn’t necessarily be an obvious thing to do. We have about seven education and outreach officers working specifically on this.” There are also kids’ clubs, and the most successful are those where the cinemas are embedded in their local communities. 

At the other end of the age spectrum, Picturehouse is experimenting with screenings for dementia sufferers and their carers. 

Cinemagoers now also have more choice about what they watch, and when, through an initiative run by Ourscreen – an independent company that Picturehouse helped to fund – which allows customers to choose a film and venue, and raise an audience. “It’s demand-led cinema and screenings are crystallising quite regularly – at least once a week – within our estate now,” says Goleby. She doesn’t think Ourscreen will transform traditional cinema, “but it is a fantastic add-on for the customer, particularly those who like to control their world through social media”. 

But are there enough good films every year to meet Picturehouse’s eclectic programming criteria? Striking the right balance is the most difficult challenge, says Goleby, particularly given that arthouse film distribution is “not an entirely healthy sector”. She says some of the most interesting movies come out of festivals such as Cannes, Sundance, Berlin and Toronto – and, while Picturehouse has traditionally “threaded [these] through the tapestry”, it plans to include more of them. 

Such movies are likely to account for a growing proportion of Picturehouse’s offering, which, combined with the growing importance of event cinema – will make for an even more eclectic mix of films.

Feel the buzz

However, Goleby believes that to protect itself against over-dependence on third parties, Picturehouse shouldn’t be wholly reliant on film. “We work very hard at delivering a complete experience, albeit with film firmly at the core.”

Cinema evolves, and Goleby believes that “people will continue to gather together in darkened spaces to watch stories”. “It sounds awfully ‘new age’, but there’s a collective energy in people experiencing emotions together,” she explains. “It is more exciting to watch one of our theatre or opera events in a full house than it is with half a dozen people. You can feel the buzz.” Despite the coughing and the crackling sweet papers? Yes, says Goleby – even despite the vibrations and ethereal green light emanating from mobile phones, which are “the scourge of my life”. “Sadly, it’s not legal to block mobile phones in cinemas, otherwise I’d be the first to do it,” she says. 

The sale of Picturehouse Cinemas to Cineworld made Goleby rich, but she seems as involved in – and excited about – the business as ever. “I sold the company so we could build more cinemas. How sad is that?” she says.