It's an Everyman and can be found in the highrise nomansland that separates Westfield from the Olympic Park, now officially known as Stratford Cross. It's housed in a brushed metal box tucked beneath 20 floors of Grade A office space. It has three screens, two half the size of the other, and a total of 253 seats. It opened yesterday with a screening of the new Paddington film (1h 46m • mild threat). It's known as the Everyman Stratford International for awkward reasons which ultimately date back to Eurostar never stopping here. And it perfectly exemplifies how what used to be grubby old Stratford has become a hotbed of default gentrification.
The entrance is in a planter-heavy piazza watched over by security guards who watch you intently should you choose to linger without purpose, just beyond an Everyman-branded snowglobe designed to alert passers-by to the new arrival. Members of the British Council and Care Quality Commission wander past in search of noodly tubs to take back to their desks, while the new winebar nextdoor hopes that TfL executives will drop by for a workplace pit-stop over lunch. The entrance to the Everyman assumes you already know what's showing inside, making no attempt as yet to mention any films, and leads to a lobby bedecked with Hogwartsesque panelling and a seasonal tree. Take the lifts or the stairs and you could be watching Gladiator II with an Aperol Spritz in your hand within minutes.
The team that compiles Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park's social media feed are very excited about it.
'Everyman' is a most inappropriate name for a boutique cinema chain because it very much isn't for everyone. Everyman cinemas have plush red seats and separate cushions, not cramped perches the cleaning staff give a cursory brush between screenings. They also come with little sidetables to rest your popcorn box on, and also perhaps your vegan cheeseburger and mojito, because Everyman's signature offering is an at-seat waiter service. For some people that is indeed a ideal night out, snuggling with a plus 1 watching Hollywood's finest while someone tops up your red wine and brings you £7.90 slices of pizza. But the average Londoner is more likely to consider a £20 seat price an occasional luxury or entirely out of reach, and I bet Everyman's punters are delighted the masses choose to go elsewhere.
They go to Stratford's 13 year-old cinema.
Vue opened in 2011 at the same time as Westfield, a 20-screen digital wonderworld accessed up the maximum number of escalators. It is perhaps more flash than welcoming, a blazing doorway leading to a lower foyer with queueing slalom for the unprepared while those in the know flash their phones at the security guard and glide gently to the pic'n'mix. Tickets bought online cost £1 less than those bought from the desk, and even then they only cost £7.99 making this much more of an affordable treat. Vue thus attracts more of the teenage crowd, whose inability to put their phones away mid-performance nudges many better-off filmgoers towards somewhere quieter, although an auditorium full of people focused on chomping fried food and ordering more alcohol may be no less distracting.
One way Vue excels is in its breadth of film choices, which is easy to do when your screening space is divided up into 20 separate boxes. The big auditoria get the blockbusters, allowing more people to watch one screening of Wicked than can fit in the entire Everyman up the road. But the smaller outliers get the art house movies, the leftovers from last month and in particular a wide range of Asian films, tonight including a Bollywood blockbuster, a 3-hour action sequel in Hindi and two other films whose original languages are Tamil and Malayalam. Know your audience and if you're lucky they'll stay til the credits roll after midnight.
They used to go to Stratford's millennial cinema.
The Picturehouse opened in 1997, designed in postmodern Art Deco style as a counterpoint to the Victorian Theatre Royal nextdoor. Unusually you can determine its function from the exterior - four parallel screens backing onto the gyratory, a long welcoming foyer and a tubular open-plan projection booth running the length of the building. In an era when out-of-town multiplexes were generally the default it always felt like a truly innovative exception. It's also probably my most-visited cinema, nabbing a cheap ticket from the booths by the door or later from the guy at the snack counter hoping to upsell me a popcorn and never succeeding because I'd treated myself to a bag of Minstrels from a nearby newsagent. Alas all now a thing of the past.
The writing was on the wall for the Picturehouse when the Vue opened across the tracks, much larger and with a similar focus on low price tickets. It took away most of the noisy teens in the back seats but it also removed most of the audience, which was great for those of us who remained but terminal for the balance sheet, hence the doors closedfor good at the end of July this year. Initially there were plans for Metro cinemas to take over, indeed if you peer in through the glass doors you can see their branding all around the box office, but I understand they pulled out recently and this iconic building faces an uncertain future.
Stratford has a lot of closed cinemas.
This is the Rex on Stratford High Street which showed films from 1933 to 1969 but these days couldn't survive even as an indoor trampoline park. The Gaumont on Tramway Avenue closed in 1960 and was converted into a factory, since demolished. The Playhouse on Broadway was destroyed by German bombs in 1941, the Trocadero on Juppe Road succumbed to market forces in 1938 and Gale's Electric Theatre was replaced by a Marks & Spencer in 1917. Even the Picturehouse would have looked snootily upmarket compared to some of these.
Whatever, if your idea of a good cinema is a cafe-bar with sofas and soft cushions, the new Everyman Stratford International is ready to take your money. You could watch three times as many films by sticking with Vue, but you couldn't do that with an at-seat tempura prawn sharing plate and a Smoked Pineapple Margherita so pick carefully. If a high-profile vibrant destination is your preferred choice then you're probably an incomer, so dig deep and the rest of us will stick with the cheap seats.
