After a three-month closing for renovations, the former Nugget Twin Cinemas re-opened Memorial Day Weekend with increased sales from its four new screens, two of which are equipped to be able to show the same film simultaneously.
Approximately 10,000 tickets have been sold at Nugget Theaters since the re-opening, said Tom Byrne, general manager of the Hanover Improvement Society, the organization that has owned the not-for-profit Nugget since 1922. That figure is up about 2,000 tickets from the average for this time of year, Byrne said.
The Nugget screened 40 shows the first weekend it opened which has now settled to a vigorous 32 shows per weekend, Byrne said. The old Nugget configuration only allowed for 12 shows to run every weekend.
The additional screens mean that the Nugget will be able to present more films that are geared towards specific audiences while at the same time running new releases.
Byrne said he has already seen a difference in the Nugget's business that he attributes to the greater selection of movies.
Byrne said it has been "very satisfying" to see an increase in the number of Dartmouth and high school students that frequent the theater, drawn by movies such as "Austin Powers" and "Chasing Amy," which the Nugget would previously not have offered due to space constraints.
Byrne said the new theater also has a new sound system with surround sound, new film handling equipment, automated controls for the projectors, and new lenses and screens.
Since all of the renovations remain within the theater's original "footprint," none of the remodeling is visible from the outside. But Byrne said the changes inside the Nugget have made it a "rejuvenated building."
"I am really very pleased with how it looks," Byrne said. "A lot of things were done that had needed to be done before."
In 1994, when the Nugget was still a "twin cinema," "Forrest Gump" showed at the theater for 12 weeks. Then, the theater was unable to serve local residents with new films while "Gump" was running.
But the new four-screen format should alleviate this problem. Larger releases can still tie up screens for extended periods of time. Byrne said the Nugget decided not to screen "The Lost World" because they would be forced by licensing agreements to run the film on their dual-screen projector for at least four weeks.
Two years ago, a group of students from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration produced a survey in which Byrne and the Hanover Improvement Society found impetus for change.
Their study revealed that people who frequented the six-screen Sony Theatres in Lebanon rather than the Nugget generally went to twice as many movies as at the people who went to the Nugget.
Byrne previously told The Dartmouth he felt that this statistic was mostly due to the lack of movie options with Nugget only having two screens.
"There was a market that we weren't serving," he said.
