GRAND RAPIDS, MI — The last time Emily Loeks spoke at a lectern in the piazza of Studio Park, a $160 million retail, residential, and move theater complex her family opened in downtown Grand Rapids, it was during the development’s celebratory grand opening last October.
On Thursday, she returned to the piazza, but with a starkly different message: Let us reopen our movie theater.
“The timing has become urgent,” said Loeks, whose family owns the Celebration Cinema movie theater chain, which has been closed since March because of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s executive orders to minimize spread of the coronavirus.
“Closing our doors has come at considerable cost, with losses of close to $1 million a month for our company, and our options have become limited. Most painfully we’ve needed to put up to 95 percent of our team on furlough.”
Movie theaters are among a handful of businesses that remain shuttered in much of the Lower Peninsula due to the coronavirus pandemic. Theaters in the Upper Peninsula and a 17-county region within the northern Lower Peninsula were given the go-ahead to reopen on June 10.
During a Thursday afternoon press conference, Loeks, the head of the Grand Rapids Chamber, Grand Rapids Mayor Rosalynn Bliss and Kent County Board of Commissioners Chairperson Mandy Bolter argued that theaters and other businesses that are still shuttered due to the pandemic should be given an opportunity to reopen on a limited basis.
“I am confident that entertainment venues like Studio Park as well as our local gyms and our bowling alleys and our YMCA and others can indeed open safely as long as they have appropriate safety protocols in place,” Bliss said.
Following Thursday’s press conference, Whitmer’s office announced that gyms, pools and organized sports will be permitted to resume operations in a limited capacity on Sept. 9. The order did not extend to theaters, event venues, amusement parks and some other businesses.
“Going forward, we will continue to work with health experts to assess the risk associated with business sectors that remain closed,” Whitmer said in a statement. “For the health and safety of our families and frontline workers, it is crucial that we proceed thoughtfully and incrementally so we can measure the effects of today’s actions before we take additional steps towards re-engagement.”
Andy Johnston, vice president of government and corporate affairs at the Grand Rapids Chamber, said the governor’s decision is “a great step in the right direction.”
“We hope that the remaining businesses will be provided a pathway that allows them to open,” he said.
Loeks, who oversees public relations and community affairs at Celebration Cinema, said she was disappointed that the governor did not decide to reopen theaters.
“I do feel like gyms opening makes it increasingly clear that there are categories of businesses that have been opened in Michigan that theaters match and exceed in safety,” said Loeks, who added that she’s hopeful that the governor reconsider her decision to keep theaters closed “very soon.”
The push to reopen theaters comes as one of the industry’s first new movies, Tenet by director Christopher Nolan, was released today at select theaters. Loeks said it will “likely be the biggest movie of the fall,” and that “we want and need Michigan audiences to have the opportunity to see this movie in our theaters.”
Celebration Cinema has 13 theaters in Michigan, four of which are in Grand Rapids. The company was founded by Jack Loeks, who launched his first theater in downtown Grand Rapids in 1944.
The Loeks family opened Studio Park in October amid great fanfare.
It’s home to the first movie theater in downtown Grand Rapids in years, and also includes restaurants, apartments, retailers, a yoga studio, an office building and hotel. Portions of the project are still under construction. The movie theater includes nine-screens.
“Studio C, our family of companies, was taking by far the biggest swing in our history launching everything here,” Loeks said.
“We asked so much of our team, and we’d envisioned that 2020 was going to be a year of fully living into all this new growth. Then March came, and on March 16 for the first time in our company’s 75-year history, we shut everything down.”
Loeks says Celebration Cinema has the know-how to reopen safely.
Capacity would be limited to 25 percent to 50 percent, she said. There are other advantages the company’s theaters have too.
“We have high ceilings,” said Loeks, who added that movie theaters in 46 states have now opened and have not been identified as a source of COVID-19 spread.
“We have robust HVAC systems with fresh air intake. With reserved seating we have easy and automated ways of being able to limit capacity and separate groups to comply with CDC and health department guidelines.”
Bolter, who chairs Kent County’s Board of Commissioners, said it’s important that businesses that remain shuttered be allowed to reopen because they provide jobs and play an important role in the community.
“We want to be sure the governor knows both how badly our businesses are suffering, but also that they can open safely,” she said. “They can innovate. They can be creative, and they can do this.”
The ongoing closure has also hurt Celebration Cinema’s employee base.
Loeks said 95 percent of her company’s workers were put on furlough due to the ongoing closure, and that more than 200 employees — nearly a quarter of its workforce — have left to take other jobs.
“These are not easily replaceable cogs in some machine,” she said. “These are the people who know how to make the magic happen.”
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