RUTLAND, Vt. (WCAX) – Rutland has been without a movie theatre since the start of the pandemic nearly four years ago. Now, the mayor and other community members are pushing to bring back the days of the silver screen.
If they build it, will people come?
“Absolutely, I enjoy the movies, said Kim Rayborn, a Rutland resident.
For some, like Rutland Mayor Mike Doenges, the idea of bringing back the movies is seeped with nostalgia. “You have things like your home, your work. What’s that other place where you go to spend your time? We luckily in the summer have tons of stuff outdoors. In the winter we have the mountains and stuff like that. But when I was growing up here as a kid, it was always the movie theater and the bowling alley, and we lost the movie theater,” Doenges said.
There are multiple movie theaters across southern Vermont, but all are a few towns away from Rutland.
“We miss it a lot. This is part of our life, part of Rutland County. Everybody loved it,” said Malcolm Hanbry of Rutland.
Rutland used to have its own two theatres. Flagship Cinemas was in the Rutland Plaza but closed during the pandemic. The mayor wanted to put a new theater in the same location but the plaza’s owners, Brixmor Properties, leased out the space to Planet Fitness, which recently celebrated its grand opening last month.
“One of the first phone calls I made in this office at this desk was to Brixmor, the Plaza. And they told me the space had already been leased out. So, it wasn’t even an option and it was a little disappointing to know that the space that was pre-designed to be a movie theater would no longer be a movie theater,” Doenges said.
A new movie theater would not only keep residents and their income in the city but the mayor says it would also help other local businesses. “Everybody asks for it. We have people who leave our town all the time to go watch movies. When you leave our city, when you leave our area to go watch movies, that economic investment goes somewhere else. So, we need to keep it here for many reasons but we also need the service available.
“It’s just something else to do. There’s not a lot here in Rutland. I know the mayor at one time was talking about bringing a lot more entertainment into Rutland and he’s adhering to his promise,” Rayborn said.
The mayor says he has connected theater owners to some local developers and those same developers to potential investors. The main challenge, he says, is finding a location to build a new theater or repurpose an existing space.