As well as latest Hollywood releases, the council says Backlot intends to host “independent gems, event cinema and big screen classics”. Taylor hopes they go light on the classics – which he has worked hard to bring to Blackpool audiences and funded from his own pocket.
“We’re all a little bit nervous but also excited to have more cinema in the area,” he says. “Cinema here is a fraction of what it was. It’s great that they can build something new and fancy but to keep something old going is also really important.
“We wish them every success. We love anything to do with cinema and to have the multiplex here will be great. We just hope we can co-exist because there is room for us both”.
Taylor’s nervousness is no doubt in part, too, due to the general decline of cinema. As far back as 1996 American critic Susan Sontag described cinema’s 100 years in the shape of a life cycle – “an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline”. Back then Blackpool still had two town centre cinemas – the ABC and the Odeon. The new one on Rigby Road would open two years later. But audiences, Sontag said, were already waning.
“Ordinary films, films made purely for entertainment (that is, commercial) purposes, are astonishingly witless; the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to their cynically targeted audiences. While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative film-making.”
In the first quarter of 2023, figures from the British Film Institute (BFI) revealed cinema admissions were the lowest since 2014, when they first began recording them.
There were 26 million cinema tickets sold in the UK in that period – 6 per cent lower than the same period in 2022, 27 per cent less than 2020, and 30 per cent less than 2019.
“Cinemas generally are not in their heyday because of the choice we have at home,” says Mugonyi. “There’s a multi-billion dollar industry designed to keep you consuming video on demand. A lot of research and a lot of money has gone into keeping people in their houses and not coming out to cinemas.”
To lure people out of their cosy confines, she says, cinemas must diversify and have added value.
“Financial offers and incentives are, of course, the easy one, but they also need to offer something you wouldn’t always expect in terms of the programme. We’ve seen more things like in-person introductions and Q&As, or live cinema from the National Theatre or the Royal Opera House. But even then you can’t just play it and they will come. A lot of work goes into developing audiences for that and I think that’s something that’s quite indicative of wider Fylde Coast film culture. People assume that if you put something fancy on the audience will turn up.”