Wrangell’s theater will be making the switch to digital on the weekend of June 28 - 30.
Digital has a number of benefits, not the least of which will include lower shipping fees – rather than paying for 60+ pounds of film to be express-shipped to (and from) Wrangell each week, the film will arrive on a much smaller, lighter hard drive. Additionally there will be fewer man hours involved in splicing the films together and in actually running the film – this means that, even with the cost of going to digital – we will not need to raise our ticket prices to compensate.
As some of you may have noticed, it’s been harder and harder this year to get print copies of films in a timely fashion (which translates to longer and longer waiting periods for those blockbusters that everyone wants to see). The digital conversion should allow us to get those films sooner, although we still will be lagging roughly a month behind the release dates due to other requirements that production companies have (such as keeping a ‘first release’ film for a minimum of two weeks – three in some cases, and charging more than double the rent on new release films).
Which brings us to money… Wrangell is very fortunate that the theater is a department of the City & Borough of Wrangell; many other theaters are struggling to raise funds to make the switch to digital. In our case, the theater department has built up a ‘repair and replacement’ fund which will partially cover the cost of the conversion. Savings in shipping fees and staff time will help chip away at the remaining costs over the next few years. Without the backing and support of the City in making the switch to digital, our theater would soon go dark as production companies phase out print copies of films (it is estimated that print films will be unavailable in as few as two years).
It is worth noting that, as a city department, the theater has been able to cover its costs over the years, including paying a portion to the Nolan Center for use of the building and has provided a ‘first job’ to many youth in Wrangell. That is not to say, however, that the theater is a cash cow for the city – and has run close to that red line once or twice (as with any city department, the finances are available to the public and are printed annually in the city budget).
And, for those who hear ‘digital’ and think ‘3-D’, I’m sorry to say that adding 3-D would more than double the cost of making the switch to digital (and includes buying a new screen, among other things) so, while our picture quality will be better, we’ll still be in a 2-D universe for the foreseeable future.
Kris Reed
Theater Manager
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