Columbus Monthly / October 2010 / Grandview Theatre, the first year

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Grandview Theatre, the first year

After more than $250,000 and a year in renovations, David Nedrow and wife Jennifer Stancel reopened the Grandview Theatre last December with the Robert DeNiro dramedy Everybody’s Fine. As the theater approaches its first anniversary, according to Nedrow, everybody’s still fine.

With more than 100 screens in Columbus—24 of them exactly 2.1 miles north of the Grandview Theatre at Lennox Town Center—a single-screen cinema seems a risky venture. But according to the fledgling entrepreneurs, nothing yet in the theater business has come as a surprise.

“We spent several months on the business plan, so I think we really anticipated almost everything that we possibly could,” Nedrow explains.

When the couple took over the space vacated by Drexel Theatre Group in 2008, they realized their first obstacle would be the cinema’s relative anonymity.

“For 20 years, this theater has never been promoted,” Nedrow says. “The big thing we have to do is build awareness. The best way to do that is to bring in films, at least in this initial year or so, that are going to bring a lot more people in—especially a different demographic than what was here before.”

So, while the original programming plan featured foreign and independent pictures, the Grandview Theatre actually has relied primarily on mainstream films in its first year.

“If we bring in something like Inception that does really well,” Nedrow says, “then that gives us the opportunity to take a little bit of a beating when we bring in that foreign or independent film.”

He credits special programming, including showing the complete World Cup competition earlier this year, as well as an expanded list of concessions, with much of the business’s financial stability.

“You have to have those concession sales to be successful over the long term,” Nedrow explains. “Ticket purchases, if you’re lucky, pay the rent, especially for a single screen. Everything else—your utilities, your labor, everything—comes from the concession stand.”

In time for a soccer crowd that may have been new to the theater, Stancel and Nedrow secured a license to sell spirits. He says that, overall, it’s the cocktails that are making the biggest dent in the overhead.

“We look at the alcohol sales as kind of our infrastructure building fund,” he says. “We’ve been able to buy some new equipment that we hadn’t been planning on purchasing for a couple of years.”

So far, Nedrow says things have worked out more or less as planned.

“It’s where we expected to be,” he says. “When we first opened, there were nights when we just didn’t have anybody. But we haven’t had a no-show in a long, long time, so that’s comforting.”