Are Hollywood movies at Columbia’s Nickelodeon theater squeezing out local filmmakers?

In our Inside Look stories, The State's journalists take you inside places around South Carolina that you maybe haven't seen before. Read more. Story idea? statenews@thestate.com.

“Anora” is the kind of film that would have once unquestionably been there for the Nickelodeon theater to scoop up and screen during the fall season.

The acclaimed romantic comedy-drama about, per IMDB, “a young sex worker from Brooklyn” who “meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch,” comes from increasingly successful and influential indie studio Neon. The movie won the top Palme d’Or prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and is considered by many a frontrunner for Best Picture at the Oscars.

And yet, it’s not on the nonprofit Columbia theater’s schedule yet, though the team there is working on it. Securing such movies, Executive Director Sumner Bender said, is tougher than ever, and convincing audiences to get off their couches and get out to the cinema is just as tough.

“They are fighting against the companies sending directly to streaming,” she said of independent filmmakers. “They’re fighting against the companies not allowing the movies to go to the theaters. We have no control over that.”

Both internal employees and outside members of the local film community agree: The Nick isn’t the same theater it was before the pandemic. And while everyone The State spoke with for this story agreed that a lot of this has to do with how the cinema landscape at large has shifted, perspectives differed on what the theater has become in the face of its current challenges.

Mainstream pivot

One post-COVID shift noted by all is the fact that the previously indie-heavy arthouse theater now shows a lot of mainstream megaplex movies. “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” “Deadpool & Wolverine,” “Dune: Part Two” and “It Ends With Us” have all spent multiple weeks this year dominating large chunks of the schedule at the two-screen cinema on Main Street.

Bender and her team said there are a few reasons for this pivot.

The theater has long specialized in indie films, movies made by smaller studios outside of the Universals and Disneys that tend to be emotionally deeper and more stylistically daring than their traditional Hollywood counterparts. But these days, such movies increasingly get shipped directly to streaming or are owned by big studios that also place them in mainstream theaters, a problem exacerbated by the scant options left on the table this year following the film industry’s 2023 labor strikes. Body horror satire “The Substance,” for instance, recently screened at local multiplexes while it was showing at the Nick, meaning the theater couldn’t set itself apart by featuring it.

Beyond responding to these new challenges, featuring more mainstream movies has helped put butts in seats in a way smaller titles have sometimes struggled to do, Bender said.

Last year’s “Barbenheimer” hype surrounding the dueling releases of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” drove people to the Nick in a way rarely seen, as the theater joined in the trend of showing both movies and encouraging watching them as a double feature.

“Barbie,” Bender said, is now the highest-grossing film in the Nick’s 45 years.

“Getting butts in seats made us realize that people who’ve never been to the Nickelodeon are all of a sudden coming to the Nickelodeon,” she said. “It showed me that there’s people who want to come downtown to Main Street to see these movies. When we were deciding whether or not to do [‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’], and I kept thinking. I was like, Harbison doesn’t need help with their businesses. Harbison doesn’t need, Sandhills doesn’t need extra foot traffic for their businesses. The thought of people going to those theaters to see something and not coming to Main Street to support down here, I was like, ‘I feel it is our responsibility to bring that to Main Street.’”

There’s also value in showing titles that motivate people to go out to the movies, Bender added.

“If we show a movie that 100 people come to see, and then we show a movie that 1,000 people when I come see, why is the 1,000 people movie bad when 900 more people wanted to see that movie?” she said. “What is the value of one over the other? And does the value of people liking something more make it less? Sometimes that seems to be the narrative. I would argue that when we’re providing something that more people in Columbia want to see and be a part of, that’s value added to Columbia.”

Getting people through the door for screenings is key to the Nick’s survival. During its recent fiscal year that concluded in June, the theater brought in more than $413,000 of its nearly $1.28 million in income from ticket sales, with nearly $370,000 of those ticket sales coming from first-run screenings, i.e. new movies opening in theaters. The Nick is doing very well with those first-run films, overshooting the $199,000 it projected in its budget.

The theater also exceeded expectations when it came to concessions, earning nearly $262,000 when it anticipated nearly $180,000.

But the Nick is still a nonprofit, mission-driven theater. It drew more than $59,000 in the previous fiscal year from corporate contributions, more than $324,000 from individual contributions (including memberships) and more than $178,000 in government and foundation grants.

Filmmakers speak out

Some in the community expressed concern that the mainstream movies driving the Nick’s recent financial gains are squeezing out indie films and specialty screenings that wrap their arms around the local community.

A recent flash point in this debate came when Christopher Bickel, a Columbia filmmaker whose first two features received acclaim in underground horror circles, was unable to schedule the premiere screening for his new film, “ Pater Noster and the Mission of Light ,” at the Nick. He instead premiered the film earlier this month at the Independent Picture House in Charlotte.

The film will show at the theater next month as it was accepted into the South Carolina Underground Film Festival, an event rallied by outside organizers who are using the Nick as their venue. About a third of the 51 films playing the festival were made in whole or in part by in-state filmmakers or ones attending school here.

“I believe having this event is a step in the right direction for showcasing SC talent,” the festival’s Tom Faircloth said. “Everyone wanting to carry the banner for local filmmakers should put their money where their mouth is and come to film festivals to support all filmmakers, not just the films they happen to be involved with.”

Both Bickel and Bender confirmed that the reason given to him as to why they couldn’t do the premiere when he hoped was that the Nick requires at least six months notice to book special screenings and couldn’t move things around when Bickel reached out looking to show his film in roughly a month’s time.

The filmmaker said he was frustrated the theater wasn’t better able to work with a local artist looking to show his work, noting that the Independent Picture House “bent over backwards because they see that there’s importance in promoting local film, and they moved stuff around, and they gave me a showing within a few weeks.”

“Like 100 people worked on it locally,” Bickel said. “So you want to be able to share in, you know, the joy of the completion of the project with those people. And those people certainly would want to invite their friends or their significant others or their family to share in that. It’s really difficult to ask these people to drive an hour and a half away for a screening and then have to drive back through the night afterwards. We sold 250 tickets in Charlotte for this thing.”

“We could have sold out several screenings of the thing, but instead, you have ‘Joker 2’ taking up all those screens,” he added. “And I just feel like that’s not the kind of thing that people want from their local arthouse.”

Others in the local film community echoed Bickel’s complaints that the Nick can be difficult to work with when it comes to scheduling screenings.

“I’ve been a filmmaker for a decade now, made a bunch of movies in South Carolina and Georgia — some bad, some good, most of them widely distributed — and in this decade the Nick has been consistently ambivalent (at best) and hostile (at worst) to my efforts and the efforts of other local and regional filmmakers,” said Columbia’s David Axe.

“We can’t get screens for one-off or limited runs. Special events at the Nick tend to ignore small productions. I did manage to rent a screen at the Nick once, a few years ago, but that’s it. What’s galling is that every other arthouse theater in every other city I’ve visited for film festivals or special screenings has been eager to support small artists and their small movies by making spaces available for fair prices and organizing events that are friendly to small indie movies.”

Community support

The Nick pushed back on the notion that it doesn’t support the community. The theater provided a list of 170 community events held or scheduled between July 2022 and December 2024, including ones done in partnership with groups such as the SC Commission of Minority Affairs, the Jam Room Music Festival, the drag group Columbia Kings n’ Things, the Transgender Awareness Alliance, and SC Pride.

29 of these community events featured work produced by members of the local film community or involved them directly.

Beyond producing needed revenue, Bender, who took the theater’s top job in June 2022, said featuring mainstream movies helps boost awareness of the theater in general, which in turn helps make its community events more visible.

“When I first started working here, the amount of people who said, ‘I didn’t even know about the Nick,’ when I was having those conversations was crazy,” she said. “People who said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know it was for me,’ or people who said, ‘I thought y’all just showed black and white movies,’ which is what we got a lot of.”

But while the money their movies bring in is helpful, the big studios are often strict about what, if anything, can screen alongside their titles at small theaters such as the Nick. This, Bender explained, is why the theater needs six months notice to schedule a screening like Bickel’s.

“We have to be very careful in what we do and when we show things on our website, because we know they look at our website,” she said. “And so sometimes if we do a community event, we’ll have to ask them to house the tickets on their site, because we can’t publicize it.”

As to the grants the theater continues to receive, Bender said that beyond helping with special programming, they help keep ticket prices low — $10 for matinees, $12 for evening screenings — and help the theater pay living wages to its employees.

Repairing rifts

The leaders of two local film organizations told The State that while they understand the challenges the Nick is responding to, the theater needs to do a better job communicating with the community about their requirements to host events.

Andrew Gajadhar is the executive director of the Carolina Film Network, a nonprofit that strives to boost local filmmakers with efforts such as its annual Freedom Festival International, hosted away from the Nick.

“This is something that needs to be publicized,” Gajadhar said of the theater’s need for six months notice to book screenings. “What they have on their website, and what they have publicly announced to other people, that’s countercultured with what they’re saying is their actual culture.”

Curtis Caesar John is the Columbia-based executive director of The Luminal Theatre, a nomadic film group that seeks to provide “fully-curated exhibitions of diverse cinema and media of the Black/African diaspora” at pop-up screenings in spots around the country. Luminal spearheaded the effort that landed satellite Sundance Film Festival screenings at the Spotlight Cinemas Capital 8 in northeast Columbia during the event’s COVID-altered 2021 outing.

John said the Nick needs to do more to build a bridge to where the theater feels welcoming and accessible to the local film community, particularly when it comes to the Black community.

The Nick was accused of systemic racism by two former employees in an open letter back in 2020. That controversy resulted in the resignation of the person in charge of Indie Grits, the theater’s film festival and media education arm. Neither aspect of Indie Grits have returned to action since.

For John and Gajadhar, repairing the rifts that remain requires the Nick to be the one asking local filmmakers and community groups back to the table, not waiting for them to come to the theater and then communicating the requirements to do business.

“If you’re saying you’re trying to create the space, create the space and make it so and try to work with folks to do it,” John said.

Bender and her team say this is what they’re trying to do, though they admitted there are strides to be made. While Indie Grits isn’t likely to make a return any time soon, the Nick wants to soon bring back internally programmed film festivals and place an emphasis on reaching out to local filmmakers and community groups to help shape these efforts. Improving communication with local filmmakers about how they can work together with the Nick will also be a priority moving forward.

The executive director said that some efforts along these lines are already happening, pointing to the multi-week April run of “Hero,” a film directed by University of South Carolina professor Dustin Whitehead and produced through Columbia nonprofit Local Cinema Studios.

“People are coming to us so much, that’s where all of our programming is filling up, right? So it’s people reaching out and wanting to work with us barely even having time,” she said. “We look forward to being able to turn that around and actually go out into the community and say, ‘We want to bring your work in here.’”