Santikos Shut Down in San Antonio?

[Dennis Benjamin]

All Santikos theaters are closed Thursday due to ‘technical difficulties’ (ksat.com)

SAN ANTONIO – All Santikos theaters in San Antonio are closed Thursday due to technical difficulties.

Officials with the theater chain posted the announcement on social media.

“We understand the inconvenience this may cause and sincerely apologize for any disruptions to your plans,” the post stated.

Santikos’ Guest Care Center is open for questions but won’t be able to process refunds until further notice.

The theater chain’s technicians are working to resolve the issue.

The technical problems are not affecting Grand Theatres and AmStar Cinemas, which are owned by Santikos in markets outside of San Antonio.

KSAT has reached out to Santikos officials for more information about the technical issues.

[Dennis Benjamin]

Day two of the mysterious shut
down...

santikos.jpg

[Jim Cassedy]

Wow!
As someone who is still dealing almost daily with the recent expired server certificate kerfuffle,
I'm really curious to find out what happened, once they figure out what their problem was,
although I think it's reasonably safe sto assume this is something else or they would have
had issues before now. But stories like this make me very uneasy to think about how many
of us are only one obscure software glitch away from total cinema system insanity and
auditorium annihilation.

I spent about 4½ weeks at this Santicos location in 2017, running 70mm DUNKIRK. It was a
huge, nicely run operation with I think 21 auditoriums, including IMAX. No Sony stuff in the
building. If my memory is correct, it was all BARCO projectors andGDC servers, although I
think they had one or two Dolby units in house. While I was there, two of the auditoriums
were in the process of being upgraded to new BARCO laser projectors, andDolby Atmos™.
They had a great staff and a competent tech-crew who treated me very well during my visit.

This place was so big, I actually spotted it from the air, while flying into San Antonio


Their concession and dining/food-court area was one of the largest I'd ever seen.

(These pix were taken early one morning before opening- -which is why U C no people )
SanticosFoodStuff.jpg

The DUNKIRK auditorium. I think capacity was just under 400.


Nice, slightly curved floor-to-ceiling screen

[Frank Cox]

"cannot process refunds until further notice."

Sounds like the friendly neighbourhood ransomware dudes.

[Mike Blakesley]

That's what I was thinking.

[Leo Enticknap]

Ransomware hadn't occurred to me, but PoS IT did, given that they said specifically that they can't process refunds. If so, they likely can't process concessions sales, either, which puts them dead in the water.

[Bobby Henderson]

I wonder if Santikos will make any detailed public statements on just what brought down all those screens.

If the culprit was ransomware it would certainly make the theater's IT operations look very incompetent.

I can only guess that so many of their computerized systems (point of sale, booth operations, etc) were deeply interconnected all to create "efficiencies" -in order to minimize the amount of management and hourly staffers needed. The way "big business" is being run in America these days I could expect the Private Equity "trader bro" crowd to move in and start tearing apart these places and selling off the remains for scrap.

I spent about 4½ weeks at this Santicos location in 2017, running 70mm DUNKIRK. It was a
huge, nicely run operation with I think 21 auditoriums, including IMAX.

I visited a similiar 22 screen "Palladium" location west of Houston a decade ago. Santikos built and opened this huge theater in 2013. The Greek columns, fancy tile and other visual features were a big departure from the more gaudy and tacky stylings of many cinema designs of the 1980's and 1990's. But it looked like it cost a lot of money to operate that theater. The big complex was built next to the Grand Parkway, Houston's third loop highway (still in various phases of planning and construction). There are lots of new housing subdivisions nearby. Katy Mills is a few miles to the North. Yet something hasn't worked. Santikos spun off the theater to Regal in 2018 and then Regal handed it off to Cinemark last year.

A theater location that has changed hands 3 times in a decade is probably one that missed attendance forecasts. The neighborhoods nearby all look like upper middle class to upper class. Then again, it seems more people buying those kinds of homes are middle aged and older "empty nest" types. They don't visit movie theaters as often as people in their teens, 20's and 30's. While that part of the Houston metro is nice, it's also a nearly 30 mile drive from downtown Houston. The vanishing theatrical window and only having to wait a month for a new movie to hit TV screens has to be another factor for lackluster ticket sales.

[Dennis Benjamin]

Crippled by ‘technical difficulties,’ Santikos reopens two more theaters (msn.com)

Santikos reopened two more of its theaters Sunday after technical difficulties led to the closure of all of its locations this week.

In a Facebook post Sunday afternoon, Santikos said its Casa Blanca and Northwest locations have resumed operations. On Saturday, the company said it reopened its Palladium theater complex at The Rim.

Santikos did not indicate when its other locations would reopen but asked customers to stay tuned.

The company blamed “unforeseen technical difficulties” when its screens went dark Thursday. It said technicians were “working diligently to solve the problem” and its customer service center was available to answer questions but would not issue refunds “until further notice.”

The theaters stayed closed Friday. Announcing the reopening of the Palladium, Santikos said it had worked “tirelessly” to solve the technical issues, but still provided no details on what the issues were.

[Jim Cassedy]

I'm not sure why a couple of my photos of the Santicos Palladium in San Antonio, which was where I
was assigned to run DUNKIRK in 2017, disappeared, from my original post. It's to late to edit the post,
so, in case you're curious, here they are with original captions:

This place was so big, I actually spotted it from the air, while flying into San Antonio
SanticosExterior2.jpg

Their concession and dining/food-court area was one of the largest I'd ever seen.
SanticosConcession_2.jpg

Nice, slightly curved floor-to-ceiling screen. (I asked if they had a movable masking, since I saw masking
control buttons in the booth, but the person I asked wasn't sure. At some point I went behind the screen and
found that there 'was' a masking but it was missing the motor. . which I later found under the booth stairs)
DunkirkAudScrn.jpg


The DUNKIRK auditorium. I think the seating capacity was just under 400
DunkirkAudVu.jpg

BONUS PHOTO:
One thing I really enjoyed was that one of my between-show breaks came at exactly the same time that
the Six Flags Amusement Park, which was about a mile away, put on their big nightly fireworks show.
I'd step outside for my 'fresh-air' break and watch it almost every night!
SixFlagsFireworks.jpg

Jim C

[Bobby Henderson]

Why do so many IMAX branded auditoriums in major cities have such mediocre seat counts? I can understand if it's an older IMAX house that was originally built for specialty 15/70mm shows; a capacity of 700 isn't needed for hour-long documentaries. The digital-only IMAX houses primarily show Hollywood movies. Those kinds of theaters should be able to sell more tickets, right? A bunch of newer digital-only IMAX houses in big cities have capacities of only 300-400 people or less than that. It's unusual to find any that have 500 or more seats.

Here in Oklahoma the Moore Warren Theater (now a Regal location) has the highest seating capacity in the state, roughly 600 seats. That makes sense; it's in the Oklahoma City metro. Here in Lawton the IMAX screen at our former-Carmike/now-AMC location has around 550 seats. I think Lawton got lucky with that. The screen and seating capacity could have been considerably smaller yet still carry that "IMAX" brand. San Antonio is a city of well over 1 million people just in terms of city limits population; metro population is over 2 million. That certainly should be a big enough market to warrant an IMAX house with at least 500-600 seats or more. I understand the San Antonio metro probably has a decent number of multiplex locations and probably at least a few IMAX houses. Still, a market with 2 million people (and the Austin metro's 2 million nearby) should be able to support bigger auditoriums.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Imax has pretty strict viewing angles which comes into play towards the actual number of seats that can go in. Depending on how much land they have to build a plex on partially determines how many seats are going to end up in the Imax, and the rest of the plex for that matter. Often rooms with lots of seats, many you would never want to sit in, are seats just used for booking purposes.

And personally, I hate recliners.... give me a good memory foam seat. They are a heck of a lot more comfortable. I don't hate them because THEY CUT DOWN THE SEAT COUNT. Not a one I've sat in has come close to actually being comfortable They seem more like a reclining board.. Perhaps a memory foam recliner would be better, not sure that exists for theaters, but they do for home and office.