March 13,  2009



The movies are coming back to Avon.

R/C Theatres will reopen its Avon venue on May 1, according to David Phillips, chief operations officer of the company.

The Avon theater will have a four-month run and will close again on Labor Day.

The theater will have four shows a day, seven days a week, Phillips said.

R/C Theatres closed the Avon movie theater last Labor Day.

“The last couple of years,” Phillips said in a telephone interview, “the amount of money made in the off-season did not cover the overhead.

R/C Theatres has had the lease on the Avon movie theater for about seven years, Scott R. Cohen, president and chief executive officer of the company, said last fall.

“I lose a fortune there every year,” he said then, adding that the Avon theater has never made money in the years his company has had the lease.

Last fall, Cohen would not say whether the theater was permanently out of business.

There was a “for lease” sign on the building through the fall and winter.

“This was not an easy decision to make,” Cohen said last fall after the theater closed.  “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, located outside Baltimore, Md., 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 were disappointed about last fall’s closure, especially since it came just weeks before the opening of the movie, “Nights in Rodanthe,” which is set on Hatteras and was filmed on the island in May, 2007.

Most islanders would like to see the theater open again year-round, but for now they are happy to have four months of movies to look forward to.

Comments are always welcomed!      Subject :      Name :  (required)      Email :  (required, will not be published)      City :   (required)    State :   (required)      Your Comments: May be posted on the Letters to the Editor page at the discretion of the editor.