‘I know,’ I said to my friend recently. ‘Let’s see a film!’ We booked the Everyman Kings Cross, the only cinema that happened to be showing what we wanted to watch at a convenient time and location.
You might already be familiar with the Everyman concept. According to the chain, it’s ‘redefining cinema’ with an ‘innovative lifestyle approach to our venues, where you swap your soft drink for a nice glass of red wine and a slice of freshly made pizza served to your seat’. And apparently it’s popular – an Everyman opened in September in Egham, Surrey, bringing the total to 38, and another one is announced for Durham early next year.
But after my latest visit, I found myself marvelling at the success of what might be the most annoying cinema concept on earth. Even its name seems a bit of a misnomer as we endure a cost-of-living crisis, with a single ticket costing almost £20 – more than the cheap seats to see Simon Russell Beale in Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman or to watch a film at many branches of Vue.
Luxury cinemas are not exactly new: businessman David Broch bought the original Everyman in Hampstead in 2000 and began the rollout soon after, roughly when the trend for boutique movie theatres gathered steam in the US. In the hedonistic peak before the financial crash of 2008, I recall being invited to a three-course dinner in my seat at a newly vamped-up Odeon Imax in London, beginning with very bad cocktails in a blingy, windowless bar.
The Imaxes have kept their marvellous seats, but the bad cocktails and poncy, inconvenient food faded away. If only that had happened everywhere. Instead, the idea of the cinema as a boozy food-fest has, over the past two decades, been intensively harvested by Curzon, Picturehouse and other independents.
But it’s Everyman that has pushed it all to a perverse level. Everything about the chain’s ‘luxury’ cinema experience interferes with actually watching a film. The prominence and relentlessness of the booze offering – the vast 660ml bottles of craft beer, the cocktails – all has the distinctly unsuitable effect of reducing people’s ability to focus, leading to the checking of light-emitting phones; to stay awake, leading to loud snores; and, of course, to avoid trips to the loo, almost as annoying for those in the path of the loo-goer as for the person who has to dash out. The vats of Coke one used to associate with a trip to the big screen at least had integrity, and the loos in a multiplex tend to be far handier.
If cinema audiences want to trade good old-fashioned popcorn and Coke for a king prawn and avocado burger, fine. But do they have to have it all brought to them at their seat during the film?
Then there’s the food. Posh popcorn is one thing, such as is for sale at Picturehouse and Curzon cinemas. Those places also sell more substantial bites in their bars and cafes; plates of bits of meat, cheese, hummus and pita; perhaps the odd olive. But at truly luxurious cinemas, there’s more, it’s hot, and it’s brought to you by a waiter. Everyman has partnered with Spielburger, the ersatz burger chain, and offers the likes of metronomically on-trend Korean chicken burger with ‘pickled slaw’, shrimp and avocado (king prawn patty? Really?), and the now-mandatory vegan burger.
If cinema audiences want to trade good old-fashioned popcorn and Coke for a king prawn and avocado burger and a tank of Punk IPA, Australian Viognier or ‘a film’s worth of gin and tonic for two’, then let them. But do they have to have it all brought to them at the seat – up to and even after the start of the film – by waiter-like creatures conjured up by marketing and management, who have to keep trying not to trip on everyone’s feet in the dark and spill ketchup and booze over everyone’s knees, and in doing so make it impossible to actually watch anything? Apparently they do.
When you charge punters £19.10 a pop to watch the latest trash in a darkened room (and I love trash), you have to pack extra value, or the appearance of extra value, in somewhere. And so, like an ‘exclusive’ nightclub, the Everyman provides a ‘host’, a sort of Black Mirror-esque take on the American movie theatre ushers of old. After badgering you to tell them what you are seeing and when and if you know where (what was this, I muttered to my friend, a surveillance exercise?), they race to help you purchase a first round of food and drink. Later, they give a brief, customer-service-themed speech before the film starts, a sorrowful modern update on the master of ceremonies, offering still more coaxing information about how to order food and drink to your seat.
When I returned from the loo five flights of stairs down (yes, five) before the film began, my friend waved a bar of plain Green and Black’s chocolate: the host had gone round handing them out, telling recipients that the chocolate went ‘especially well with the negronis’. Cynical oldsters that we are, we grumbled (through horrible mouthfuls of Green and Black’s) that we’d have preferred them to charge less for the tickets and hold the £1 bars of chocolate.
The modern luxury cinema experience is terrible for food, drink and luxury – and even more terrible for watching films. Once the waiters finally stop trampling over you with large trays, and once your neighbour is firmly entrenched with their suite of odorous consumables, and once you have just about stopped worrying that you’ll miss still more of the film because of the interruptions of more waiter service for latecomers, you find yourself distracted again, wondering who you loathe more: the clever clogs who dreamed it all up, negronis and all, or their flatbread-munching, cookie-dough-ice-cream-eating, espresso-martini-swilling dupes, a group from which I have still not entirely managed to exclude myself.
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