Hello all, Many thanks everyone for your encouraging and very constructive comments. I will be undertaking a more thorough feasibility study over the coming months and I will certainly keep the forum updated. The key challenges that have been highlighted by this thread are finding a suitable location which will be key and transport links - car parking is of course a problem so the cinema, I imagine, would not be able to cater to people driving in (in large numbers). It would have to be able to thrive on people walking and taking the bus. Just to respond to some individual points: EDMummy and Nero - I'll be looking into suitable sites over the coming months. Thanks for suggesting Thomas More Hall. I expect that a lack of suitable location may well be the main barrier to the idea working or not. cazza, Norfolkvillas and JessM - I haven't got to looking at the programming in any depth yet but the great advantage of an independent cinema over an Odeon / Vue / Cineworld etc. is that the programme can be tailored exactly to what customers want. So, if I'm able to proceed with the idea you can be sure that daytime family screenings / parent and toddler screenings and weekend and bank holiday matinees would certainly be on the programme, no question. Dorothy - likewise, child-free screenings are a great concept too and I really like them. Some Cineworlds have recently introduced over-18 screenings for "family films". Effectively, it's all about making best use of the screens to ensure everyone. If I'm going to the cinema with my girlfriend, I don't necessarily want to be distracted from a film by kids making noise and talking (even if it's a Pixar film, for example). On the other hand, if I'm taking my nephew, I don't want to feel uncomfortable because he's asking questions etc. but disrupting other people. So it's all about giving some options to improve the experience for everyone. Reg Smeeton - sadly, conversion costs or even new build costs are very high for even small cinemas. As the margins are so low, this is why they're a challenge to build. It's possible, but it really requires the right site becoming available. fazer71 - I'm not kidding at all. As I've said above, a feasibility study might prove it sadly unworkable but I think there is a general enthusiasm for the idea and I'm very keen on ED having its own cinema. As many people have mentioned, it's the one thing that ED really is missing at the moment. DulwichFox - you're absolutely correct that many, many cinemas were forced to close down in the 1960s, 70s (and 80s too) because various changing factors meant that smaller cinemas just couldn't generate enough revenue to survive. You're wrong, however, when you say that only cinemas in the West End make money. The most profitable cinemas tend to be out-of-town multiplexes (like the Odeon in Surrey Quays) which started popping up in the late-1980s. And the number of cinemas in the UK has actually been growing considerably since 1996. We're now undergoing a revolution in how cinemas operate and that's digital projection. Since 2010, the majority of cinema screens in the UK show films digitally rather than on traditional 35mm prints. By 2014 it will be more-or-less 100% of non-specialist cinema screens. Without getting into too much boring detail, the upside is that for the first time in decades small local, independent cinemas are once again viable. And my prediction is that, over the next 10 years or so we'll see more of them springing up. It's not so much a question of the size of the cinema (many of Vue's recent new builds have been very small) but more to do with the number of screens: single scree cinemas can't really sustain themselves, even still, but small 2-3 screen cinemas - happily - now can. Once again everyone, thank you for all your really helpful comments so far!
