Greg Laemmle: Last News

A glum weekend box office overall (one of the worst of the year) wasn’t so awful for specialty, relatively speaking, with Breaking passing $1M on 900 screens and Spanish-language The Good Boss at $27K on 15. Both are a far cry from pre-pandemic numbers but did hit the new normal for limited releases – reaching at least $1 million on 500 to 1,000 screens, and keeping the per theater average above three digits.

Robert Laemmle, the owner and former president of California’s arthouse chain Laemmle Theaters, has died. He was 89.

“It was a contributor to the specialty box office, and I hope it will be again,” says Laemmle CEO Greg Laemmle of MoviePass, the subscription service that unsurprisingly went bankrupt in early 2020 after offering a movie a day for ten bucks a month.

“People are catching up on films,” is how one arthouse executive described the current moment in specialty, which echoes the slowdown in studio wide releases.

Pat Saperstein Deputy EditorThe looming closure of Landmark Theatres’ Pico location is a significant loss for L.A.’s independent movie scene, which was already sorely missing the shuttered ArcLight Hollywood. Getting art-house audiences to return to cinemas has been challenging as COVID-19 variants have swept the country, and now the question is whether the city that makes movies has enough theaters to show all kinds of titles — not just blockbusters.For moviegoers on the west side of Los Angeles, there was something special about the Landmark Pico, whose 12 screens programmed a wide variety of mostly independent and foreign films, along with industry screenings and panels.“Around the country, including in Los Angeles, there are just fewer theaters and fewer screens than there were before the pandemic,” says Jasper Basch, IFC Films and IFC Midnight head of theatrical distribution.

Robert Strauss Audiences and exhibitors may have been cheering the Spider-Man movie for months, but 2022’s most emotional theatrical experience so far is watching Greg Laemmle struggle with the fate of his family’s eponymous arthouse business in the documentary “Only in Theaters.”Premiered at the Santa Barbara Intl. Film Festival in March, “Only” inevitably focuses on the 84-year-old Southern California theater chain’s struggle to survive — first during the 2019 downturn in specialty film attendance and then through a yearlong, COVID pandemic shutdown.