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August 27, 2008
Avon Cinema 4 is closing for the season Sept. 2
By IRENE NOLAN  The president and chief executive officer of R/C Theatres has confirmed that the last day this season for the Avon Cinema 4 will be Labor Day, Sept. 1. However, Scott R. Cohen, would not say exactly whether the theater is permanently out of business, as has been rumored. “At this moment in time, we are closing down for the season,” Cohen said in a phone interview from the company’s headquarters outside Baltimore. After the last show on Labor Day, Cohen said, the company will remove the perishables and lock the doors. “I have a lease to occupy and run that theater,” Cohen said, declining to comment on word on the street that an auto supply store will be the next occupant of the building. “I can’t answer that part right now,” Cohen said. R/C Theatres has had the lease on the Avon movie theater for about seven years, Cohen said. “I lose a fortune there every year,” he said, adding that the Avon theater has never made money in the years his company has had the lease. “This was not an easy decision to make,” he said. “No one enters into a business wanting a sad ending…..We have tried to stand behind the city and town.” Cohen noted that after Hurricane Isabel cut an inlet between Hatteras and Frisco in 2003 and devastated Hatteras village, the theater offered reduced price tickets for residents. R/C Theatres is a third generation family business, he said, which owns 12 theater complexes on the East Coast from Daytona Beach to Pennsylvania. The company owns a 10-screen movie theater in Kill Devil Hills and a theater in Corolla. The theater in Corolla, Cohen said, has been a seasonal business – May through Labor Day – since it opened.  Islanders have been talking about next week’s closing for days. “It will diminish the quality of life herr for locals and visitors,” said Stewart Couch, president of Hatteras Realty. “It will be huge loss,” said Kathy Kiddy, executive director of Locomotion, the Hatteras Island teen organization. “The movie theater was one place that parents felt safe to drop off their children and pick them up after the show.” She added that youngsters on the island have little enough entertainment available on the island as it is. The closing of the Avon theaters is also coming just weeks before the opening of the movie, “Nights in Rodanthe.” “Nights in Rodanthe,” based on the best-selling Nicholas Sparks novel by the same name, is scheduled to be released in theaters on Sept. 26, according to Warner Bros. Pictures. It stars Richard Gere and Diane Lane. The movie was filmed in North Carolina, much of it on Hatteras Island and other areas of the Outer Banks and the rest at studios in Wilmington. Hatteras Islanders have been looking forward to seeing the movie. Now, the closest place they can see it will be in Kill Devil Hills. |
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