The current management of the Royal Theatre decided to go out screening Monty Python and the Holy Grail and 2001: A Space Odyssey -- Stanley Kubrick's still-compelling masterpiece.

There were more people for the second screening than the first, and at least five times more people for this screening of 2001 than the last time I saw it at the Revue three years ago.

This goes to buttress my argument about the film biz in Toronto: People go attend events, not see movies. The death of a movie theatre is an event. It wasn't enough of an event, however, to sell out every seat, even at a dollar per ticket.

But as I blogged last week, the Royal may yet live as a movie theatre.

An excerpt from the story in Now Magazine:

Though the deal isn't official until July 5, the Royal, NOW has learned, has been purchased by a scrappy young company called Theatre D Digital, which also owns the art deco Regent Theatre on Mount Pleasant.

When Theatre D bought the Regent in 2002, they restored the 1920s-era theatre and began operating it during the day as a high-end digital post-production studio. (Directors like Atom Egoyan and Patricia Rozema have edited their films there.)

Meanwhile, in the evenings, they continued to screen films in the theatre. This ingenious business model has apparently proved lucrative for Theatre D, and co-founder Dan Peel says they plan to repeat it at the Royal.

"Our plans are to restore the building back to its 1930s glory," he says.

Furthermore, the restoration won't stop with just the building itself: when Peel and his two partners, John Hazen and Carlos Herrera, begin outfitting the theatre with their state-of-the-art post-production equipment, they'll also be bringing in what Peel refers to as "the absolute best" in digital projection and 5.1 THX surround sound.

"The projector I'm talking about is beyond what's been seen yet in North America," he says excitedly.

However, I don't know if the projection system was the issue in the Royal's slow demise over the past five years.

As staff there have told me, a shrinking pool of available films plus DVDs coming out ever  faster are two major curses.* And let's not forget that first-run theatres are having trouble putting butts in seats**(two words: better movies).

* Here's an excerpt from a May 25 Now article: "... indie distributors see rep theatres as risky places to open films. Says Robin Smith of Toronto-based distribution company Capri Releasing, "Some distributors think of rep theatres as kind of secondary. They think that because a theatre isn't first-run, it can't play a first-run film properly."

Indie films cost a lot of money to promote, and "it's next to impossible to open a movie and make any money back after you pay for advertising and publicists," says film promoter Colin Geddes, who programs the Royal's Kung Fu Fridays.

** Part of the problem might be the abhorrent behaviour of some young movie-goers -- something that theatres really don't seem to care about. Stay home and watch a DVD, and if it's a mediocre movie, the financial hit is only a fraction of the cost of tickets/snacks/parking/babysitting etc. etc. that many people face. If you have people over to watch the film, that's probably enough of a collective social experience for most of us.

Chris McQuillan -- son of the late Peter McQuillan, the guy mainly responsible for the festival chain -- got somewhat emotional Friday night when he talked about the wave of nostalgia that rose up after news of the Royal's impending closure (plus other McQuillan family properties like the Revue and the Kingsway). People need to come out to movies and support the new ownership, he warned.

I couldn't agree more. I love movies, and I love seeing them on the big screen as they were meant to be seen. But I don't expect business people to go slowly broke running unprofitable, if not money-losing businesses, while sitting on real estate assets worth millions.

In this relatively sophisticated city of 2.5 million people, surely there's a business model that will support the Royal.

In the May 25 Now piece, Colin Geddes, who ran the Kung-Fu Fridays and programs TIFF's Midnight Madness programme, said this: " "Look at other cities. If rep theatres are able to survive there, then maybe the problem's not the audiences, but how the theatres are run."

Could be, but when do 800 or 900 people go see a Takashi Miike film at TIFF, and only 50 or 60 at the Royal, then what's the diff? To my mind, one's an event screening, and the other isn't.

One advantage the Bloor Cinema has over the Royal, as one example, is being a few minutes from a subway station. I suspect they offer more 'event' programming: They've had good luck on Doc Soup Nights, premieres and various little film festivals. Their "cult" programming consists of semi-regular screenings of Oz/Darkside (The Wizard of Oz set to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon), the venerable Rocky Horror Picture Show and monthly Rue Morgue orror magazine presentations. And I believe they are primarily family-run.

Cinematheque Ontario has the high-end cinephile market sewn up. But they are underwritten and supported by the TIFF group, and I suspect their rent deal in the AGO's basement is a reasonably sweet one. And since the space is small, a sold-out film is 300 people or so, which is maybe half the Royal's capacity (as an aside, the Montreal Argonauts experienced great success moving out of Olympic Stadium and into one with a capacity of 25,000; That number of people barely fills half the seats at an Argos game in the Rogers Centre. The point of that anecdote is that when a venue feels full, the crowd will instinctively feel more tribal).

For other downtown-midtown theatres, there's the Cumberland, Carlton and Canada Square, and sometimes the Camera Bar, although it seems to be periodically on the verge of death itself.

Again, friends of mine went out to see Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story at the Carlton, and there were only about 13 other people in the audience. How should we interpret that when trying to guage T.O.'s appetite for artier film fare?

So what niche should the Royal try to fill?

Personally, I'd drop Kung-Fu Fridays (which moved from the Royal to the Revue this year) and go for a more generic Asian Action night. There are some fantastic action movies being made in Hong Kong, Japan and especially Korea that deserve more exposure. I see them at TIFF, but not in theatres. Why not?

Cinametheque has had great success with Talking Cinema screenings. Why not shamelessly rip that idea off? Why not work a deal with a local bar or lounge to get some private space on an off-night and continue the film discussion there as a group?

Have a T.O. Cinema night every once in a while. Why didn't they screen The Real Toronto, as one example? The Globe had a story about two film guys who are trying to make movies set in the Jane/Finch nabe.

Besides programming, I think the Festival folks could make much better use of online media to promote interest in their films.

In the youtube era, it's astounding that one can't access a video clip of a forthcoming film on the Festival website.

Why not have a Festival blog so people can talk amongst each other online about the film they just saw -- or talk about films that are coming up?

Maurice of Ammo Video tells me the Royal brings business to his store because people from outside the nabe go shopping there.

Yet there's no Ammo video ad on the wall of the Royal.

How about some type of deal whereby presenting a receipt from Ammo gets you a small discount on your Royal ticket and your Royal ticket gets you a small discount at Ammo?

There's no magic bullets in those suggestions, but some alterations in the programming, promotions and business model could help the Royal become a self-sustaining venture.