‘This is about a love of movies’: How Toronto’s Revue Cinema became a streaming-era success story

Just a few days after it seemed like Toronto’s oldest movie theatre would have its doors abruptly boarded up, Serena Whitney is sitting in the back row of the 220-seat auditorium, breathing a tentative sigh of relief. As the programming director of the Revue Cinema, Whitney is coming off an unusually hectic few days, which began when lease-renewal negotiations broke down between the theatre and their long-time landlords and ended with a last-minute judicial reprieve.

Late last week, Danny and Leticia Mullin, who bought the Revue’s building on a prime stretch of Roncesvalles real estate in 2007, announced they wanted to take over the business from the Revue Film Society, the volunteer board that runs the not-for-profit cinema, effectively evicting cinema management. Late on Friday, the board obtained an interim injunction from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, preventing the landlords from “evicting, locking out, or otherwise interfering with Revue’s business operations” until July 8, when the court will decide whether or not to leave the order in place until trial.

In the meantime, the Revue has garnered 18,000-plus signatories on an online petition urging immediate government action.

“We weren’t expecting the overwhelming response – and it wasn’t just from the local Roncey community, but from community theatres all over,” Whitney says. “This is about a love of movies, and what happens when you bring people together to share that love.”

To understand why everyone has rallied around the Revue, it helps to understand how Whitney helped the Revue buck industry trends to become a rare brick-and-mortar success story in a streaming-first world.

In 2023, the theatre earned $1.3-million in revenue, a 45-per-cent jump from the prepandemic year of 2019 (revenues are funnelled back to staff salaries and infrastructure). The business has more than 1,000 paid memberships. Its screenings are regularly sold out. And some of Canada’s best-known filmmakers, including BlackBerry’s Matt Johnson and Infinity Pool’s Brandon Cronenberg, regularly sing its praises.

“The majority of the public wants to see films that they grew up with, so we give them what they want: Star Wars, Jaws, Terminator. But then they come in and see trailers and posters for our other movies and programs, which they might not have seen on a big screen or at all, and they’re hooked,” Whitney says.

A few years ago Whitney dreamed up the idea for an “interactive” cult-film series called Drunken Cinema. By 2018, what started as a raucous theme for her own house-parties had moved inside the Revue, part of then programming director Eric Veillette’s revitalization efforts.

“I came in with a good pitch for the monthly event, because I noticed there was a real lack of 24- to 44-year-olds at the theatre. The first one sold out, and it kept bringing in audiences,” says Whitney, whose background in search-engine optimization and social-media marketing helped drive crucial word-of-mouth.

In the fall of 2021, Veillette returned to journalism with the CBC, which is when Whitney took over – just as the Revue was reopening its doors for the first time after the pandemic had shuttered them.

“Before the pandemic, in 2019, I saw a shift in people going to more event-based cinema – I could see that strictly second-run movies weren’t going to work as much,” says Whitney.

Soon, she was overseeing 15 different programs, including Neon Dreams (focusing on neo-noir cinema from the ‘70s and ‘80s) and arts journalist Nathalie Atkinson’s Designing the Movies (which highlights production designers, art directors and set decorators). The curators who introduced the shows and held post-screening Q&As started to become as much of a draw as the movies themselves.

“We have people coming from outside Toronto on the weekend, even audiences from the U.S. if we play something on 35mm.”

The work can be intense – “I’ve put literal blood, sweat and tears into this” – but the reward is in bringing people together. And possibly offering lessons to other independent theatres across the country.

“Multiplexes are a different thing, but indie exhibitors can make it work. They just need to give audiences a reason to get off their butts at home,” Whitney says. “It takes a little bit more creativity and a lot more time.”

This week, Whitney and the rest of the Revue staff and programmers – all of whom issued joint statements Tuesday noting they would only continue to work under the current leadership – will be celebrating their short-term victory to remain open. Yet the issue is far from resolved.

Reached on Tuesday, Danny Mullin – who handed over operations to the Film Society after he and his wife bought the building – said that he intends to fight the injunction. The Film Society, though, owns the equipment, possesses the business license and maintains all the industry relationships necessary to operate the theatre.

“When I die, and that’s not going to take too long because I’m 96 years old, I’m going to put my ashes in the bricks of the wall. These people have had it for 17 years and they haven’t done anything with it,” said Mullin.

According to Grant Oyston, chair of the Film Society, Revue’s board has spent more than $500,000 on improvements, including asbestos removal, masonry work, ceiling and wall repair, and replacing the building’s original 1911 plumbing.

Whitney, meanwhile, is trying to be sanguine on the matter.

“The most important thing to get across to our landlord is that no one in the community wants to see him known as the person who destroyed the legacy of the Revue,” she says. “He saved it before in 2007, and he still has a chance to save the Revue again. We’re hoping we can all work together to make that happen.”