Audiences and exhibitors may have been cheering the Spider-Man movie for months, but 2022’s most emotional theatrical experience so far is watching Greg Laemmle struggle with the fate of his family’s eponymous arthouse business in the documentary “Only in Theaters.”Premiered at the Santa Barbara Intl.
Film Festival in March, “Only” inevitably focuses on the 84-year-old Southern California theater chain’s struggle to survive — first during the 2019 downturn in specialty film attendance and then through a yearlong, Covid pandemic shutdown.
The wear on the company’s third generation president is palpable and poignant.“I’m, at some level, better than I seem in the film,” Laemmle tells Variety a year after his theaters reopened.
“There have definitely been some less-than-positive developments during the 12 months since we’ve been open, but there have been some positive things, to be sure.”Laemmle could be speaking for the whole American arthouse sector,
Read full article