The owners of Mystic Luxury Cinemas have bought Madison Art Cinemas and will reopen the extensively renovated site sometime this month.

The two-screen Madison site has been closed since the pandemic struck in March 2020. The sale to new owners was finalized at the end of December.

Harold Blank, who owns Mystic Luxury Cinemas with Bill Dougherty, said of Madison, “I’ve actually wanted the theater for a long, long time, and the COVID shutdown provided an opportunity to give Arnold Gorlick, the owner for 20-plus years, a call, and I think that he obviously during the shutdown felt it was time to move on for a multitude of reasons. He was very gracious and said yes to discussing a sale of the theater, and in the end, we now own it and it’s hopefully going to open over the next few weeks.”

Blank said the target date keeps moving due to a variety of factors, but he expects it to open by the end of January — Jan. 14 at the earliest.

What has been Madison Art Cinemas will now be named Madison Cinemas, a reflection of the type of movies it will feature. Madison Art Cinemas was a dedicated art cinema.

“We are going to diversify the programming, very similar to what we do in Mystic, and play a lot of family films, a lot of smart movies,” Blank said. “I don’t think we’ll play as many commercial films over in Madison, like, oh, ‘Scream,’ which is going to play Mystic.”

In addition, Madison Cinemas will offer event programming, with concerts, plays and exhibits on screen, as Mystic Luxury Cinemas already does.

The new Madison Cinemas also will look very different inside.

“We’ve really done everything to it, from brand new bathrooms to new seats to new screens to upgrading the sound to all new carpeting, paint, new concession area,” Blank said. “When you walk in the movie theater, everything has been done. There’s new lights in the ceiling — really, new everything ... It will shine.”

The new seats aren’t like the heated recliners in Mystic because they would have required such a significant decrease in capacity that it wouldn’t have been “healthy for the economic function of the theater,” Blank said. But the ones that have been installed at Madison are luxurious rockers from the Irwin Seating Company.

The new seats are larger than the ones previously inside Madison, and more space has been added between rows for comfort. That means the capacity will drop from about 440 for the two auditoriums to 297.

“I’m comfortable with that capacity as being enough to satisfy the economic needs of the theater,” Blank said.

He said they had begun renovations before the final transaction officially buying Madison Cinemas, with the blessing of Gorlick and the building's previous landlord.

Blank said they also are going to install CIMR technology, which is a military-grade disinfection system, in the HVAC equipment. It disinfects the air and kills viruses.

"It will kill SARS, COVID, influenza that is in the air, so that the quality of air you breathe is quote-unquote disease free," he said.

Why the owner decided to sell

Gorlick will stay on as a consultant for about six months, helping with the transition.

Discussing his decision to sell, he noted that he started in the movie theater business in 1970.

“I did this with all my heart for all that time. I had the gift of more than a half-century of rewarding, meaningful work. ... I loved my job,” he said.

But, he added, it’s very time-consuming — not just the hours spent in the theater but also dealing with things like promotion, work schedules, revamping the website, and so on.

“I’m 75 years old now, I’m healthy, I feel good, I feel youthful,” he said. He said he is getting to leave at the top of his game and on his own terms. He noted that he and everyone involved — Blank and Dougherty — are happy with how things turned out.

From Argentina to Madison

Blank knows Madison well and recognizes its appeal.

“The town of Madison is just very charming — very much like Mystic, it’s very charming. My parents retired there from Waterbury, Connecticut, and lived in Madison from 1990 through my mother’s death in 2006, when we sold their home," he said. "I spent many weekends, holidays, birthdays in Madison.”

Blank, who lives north of Boston, has been in the movie theater business for decades and has an expansive resume. One of his standout projects was the three years he spent working for Hoyts Cinemas in Argentina. His job was to find places to build movie theaters. By the time he left, there were some 200 screens in four different countries.

“It was very, very hard work, very intriguing, very interesting, the different cultures,” he said.

Around here, he and Dougherty also bought All South County Cinemas in South Kingstown, R.I., in July. That’s slated for a renovation in late February.

The future of movie theaters

Of course, with the pandemic, the movie business has changed dramatically, Blank acknowledged.

“Yet I am very confident that the movie theater business, with all the competition from streaming, will find its way,” he said.

He noted that theater owners don’t make the movies, so they can’t control that. But, “I think the important aspect is to make certain if you are in this business to deliver a product that your guests are going to enjoy. That’s a combination of a quality picture, quality sound, comfort, a very, very good experience, a glass of wine, along with a culture that realizes that we as workers in this business are serving our guests, very much like a restaurant," he said. "We’re there to make certain that a guest enjoys the experience.”

k.dorsey@theday.com