Northwest Neighborhoods CDC Forms Advisory Board to Help Steer Capitol Theatre's Uncertain Financial Future

The Capitol Theatre in 2024. Since its first renovation in 2009, the West Side’s only movie house has been operating at a loss of upwards of tens of thousands of dollars a year. A new 10-person advisory board thinks they might have the ideas as how to save it. Credit: Mark Oprea

Hope pervaded the 100th birthday gala at the Capitol Theatre in Gordon Square on October 22, 2022.

It had been roughly a decade since the Detroit Shoreway Community Development Corporation borrowed $1.5 million to aid the ongoing restoration of the west side’s only movie theater. Debt would have to be repaid. Tickets—about 75,000 a year—had to be sold.

Which was the overarching goal of the theater’s century gala that October: “replenishing the Capitol’s reserve fund,” said the Plain Dealer at the time, “which was depleted during the shutdown” due to Covid-19.

The Capitol wasn’t an anomaly. The whole theater market struggled.

“I think it’s pretty fair to say that as an entire industry movie theaters are in a position that we have to rethink the standard model of what a theater is and how it operates,” Beth Madden, manager of marketing for Northwest Neighborhoods, the nonprofit that owns the Capitol, told Scene in March.

“And we’re really no different,” Madden added.

Earlier this month, Northwest Neighborhoods made a bet it could rescue the Capitol out of its financial and cultural slumber by forming a new advisory group of 10 called the Capitol Theatre Stewardship Board.

That group, including attorneys, city officials, Destination Cleveland reps and others, believes that it can spare the west side theater from complete financial ruin, mostly by upping its greatest assets: it’s historic, it’s unique and it’s a perfect home for independent film.

“We need to lean into the fact that the Capitol Theatre can do cool and interesting things that your local cinema can’t do,” Akshay Kalra, the economic development coordinator for Northwest Neighborhoods and secretary of the CTSB, told Scene in a call.

The goal being “to understand what people want and what we can do well—indie movies and local filmmakers,” he added. “I mean, Cinemark is all well and good; but they’re just sort of a faceless organization.”

Which means the Capitol needs to grow in the opposite direction: more face, more character.

He pointed to WTF Wednesdays, a weekly showing of cult classic films and “wacky movies,” like Brian Yuzna’s Society and Takashi Miike’s crime horror, Ichi The Killer. Movies that you might not be able to see at the plushy, suburban Regal.

As was the showing of MEAT, a queer thrasher flick released this month. Its filmmaker, Roger Conners, chose to host a debut party at the Capitol. “And it sold out the entire theater,” Kalra noted.

Just like bookstores or laundromats, historic theaters are in general finding their much-needed rebirth as third spaces as the country continues to shed off habits of isolation learned in the earlier part of the decade.

Which isn’t coming quickly. Recently, the board chair of the Cleveland International Film Festival, Joe Marinucci, wrote an email to friends of the yearly fest concerned that CIFF has “a significant challenge securing a sustainable future” at Playhouse Square. Consultants will be hired, Marinucci said, to see how exactly CIFF can get back the ticket count it saw pre-pandemic.

The question is also a pressing one to the Capitol’s new advisors.

As are other questions: Should we host more weddings? More release parties, like the one for Superman on July 10? More events connected to Gordon Square, arguably one of the most walkable neighborhoods on Cleveland’s west side?

“We forget that there’s this beautiful building here, too,” Kalra said. “We drive by it every day. And, you know what? Maybe we take that for granted.”