On a Friday night in late September, the line outside the Rialto Theater in Hollis, Kansas, stretched past the hardware store and around the corner. The marquee, freshly rewired after sitting dark for twenty-two years, spelled out the name of a black-and-white comedy from 1938. Inside, nearly six hundred people filled the red velvet seats, and when the house lights dimmed, the whole room went quiet at once. Across the country, community groups are restoring old single-screen theaters like this one, and audiences are showing up. In an era when almost any film can be streamed on a phone, the old movie palace is having an unlikely second act.
A brief history of the movie palace
In the 1920s and 1930s, going to the movies was an event. Cities and small towns alike built grand theaters with ornate ceilings, gilded balconies, sweeping staircases and organs that rose from the orchestra pit. They were called movie palaces for good reason. A ticket bought you a few hours in a space far more glamorous than most people’s homes.
By the 1970s and 1980s, many of those theaters had fallen on hard times. Suburban multiplexes with a dozen screens drew audiences away from downtowns. Single-screen theaters could not show enough films to compete, and the cost of heating and repairing a building with three thousand seats became impossible to manage. Some were split into smaller screens, some became churches or concert halls, and many were simply boarded up or torn down.
The ones that survived often did so by accident. A building was too expensive to demolish, or a stubborn owner refused to sell. Those surviving shells are now the starting point for a new wave of restorations.
Who is bringing them back
Most restorations are not led by big companies. They are led by neighbors. In Hollis, a group of fourteen volunteers formed the Friends of the Rialto in 2019 with a bake sale and a borrowed projector. Over five years they raised money through memberships, local business sponsors, a grant from the state arts council and hundreds of small donations, many of them under $50.
“People told us nobody would come,” said Gloria Mendez, the group’s president and a retired school librarian. “Then we held a single fundraising screening in the parking lot, and four hundred people showed up with lawn chairs. That was the night we knew.”
Similar stories are playing out in towns across the country. In a former mill town in New Hampshire, a nonprofit bought its 1929 theater for one dollar from the city and spent six years restoring the plaster ceiling. In a Texas county seat, a couple who met at their local theater as teenagers bought it back and reopened it on their fortieth wedding anniversary. In each case, the theater became a project the whole community could rally around.
What a restoration involves
Restoring an old theater is slow, expensive work. Organizers we spoke with listed the same major steps again and again:
- Stabilize the building, starting with the roof, the foundation and the wiring.
- Bring the space up to modern safety and accessibility codes.
- Restore or replace seats, carpet and the decorative plaster.
- Install a digital projector while keeping a film projector for special screenings.
- Relight the marquee, which is often the moment a town truly celebrates.
Each step can take years, and most groups open in phases, hosting events in a partly finished space to keep momentum and donations flowing.
More than a movie
Restored theaters host classic film nights, concerts and community events, and that variety is a big part of why they succeed. A single-screen theater cannot compete with a multiplex on new releases alone, so most revived palaces build a calendar that looks more like a community center than a cinema.
At the Rialto, a typical month includes two weekends of first-run family films, a Thursday classic movie series, a silent film night with a live pianist, a local high school’s spring musical and a monthly town hall. The lobby doubles as a gallery for local artists, and the old balcony is now available for birthday parties and wedding receptions.
That mix brings in people who might never come to a movie on their own. Teenagers come for the concerts. Seniors come for the classic films they first saw decades ago. Families come for the cheap Saturday matinees, where a ticket and a small popcorn together cost less than $10.
A movie in a full theater is a different movie.
Ruth Adams, theater projectionist
Ruth Adams has been running projectors since she was sixteen and now volunteers in the Rialto’s booth three nights a week. She says the difference is not the picture or the sound, though both are excellent. It is the people. “When a comedy plays to a full house, the laughs build on each other,” she said. “When a scary movie plays, you hear six hundred people hold their breath. You cannot get that on your couch.”
A shared experience
People miss laughing and gasping together in the dark. That simple idea came up in nearly every conversation we had while reporting this story. After years of watching movies alone on laptops and phones, many audiences are rediscovering the pleasure of seeing a film with strangers.
Theater operators say the crowds are noticeably younger than they expected. Classic film nights, in particular, have become popular with people in their twenties and thirties who grew up with streaming and have never seen an old movie on a big screen. At the Rialto, the most popular event last year was not a new release. It was a sing-along screening of a 1950s musical, which sold out three nights in a row.
There is also a practical appeal. Restored palaces tend to be in walkable downtowns, so a night at the movies becomes a night out: dinner at a local diner, a film, a slice of pie afterward. Several business owners in Hollis told us their Friday evenings have been noticeably busier since the theater reopened.
Key takeaway: The old movie palace is not coming back to compete with streaming. It is coming back to offer the one thing streaming cannot: a room full of people sharing a story at the same time.
Challenges ahead
Not every restoration is a fairy tale. Old buildings are expensive to heat, cool and maintain, and a single roof repair can wipe out a year of ticket sales. Many theaters rely heavily on volunteers, and organizers worry about burnout. Film distributors also set rules about how long new releases must play, which can be hard for a theater with only one screen.
Most groups are tackling those problems with memberships, which give regular supporters discounted tickets and early access to events in exchange for a yearly fee. Others have added a small second screen in a former storage room or upstairs lounge, allowing them to keep a new release running while hosting events in the main auditorium.
How to support your local theater
If there is an old theater in your town, the best thing you can do is simply go. Buy a ticket, buy popcorn and bring a friend. If you want to do more, look for a membership program, volunteer to usher or sell concessions, or ask whether the theater needs help with a specific project. And if your town’s theater is still dark, there may already be a group of neighbors trying to bring it back. Find them. As the line outside the Rialto proved, it only takes one full house to remind a town what it has been missing.
