Tim Richards is celebrating a milestone he feared he might not see – the 20th anniversary of the creation of Vue, Europe’s largest privately owned cinema chain. That achievement looked precarious in the pandemic, when the world’s biggest cinema operators were pushed to the brink.
“When it is your baby, your firstborn, going through this, it is very tough,” says Richards, who is in recovery mode himself, having “had an argument with a tree and lost” on a recent heli-skiing trip in his native Canada.
“It has been apocalyptic,” he says of a period in which Covid forced the chain to close completely for a period starting in 2020. “You don’t run a [financial survival] analysis on full closure for a couple of years. My goal at the time was to save the company and jobs, and that wasn’t finally done until September. Only then did I know the company was going to be OK.”
“OK” is, of course, relative. Since being founded on 13 May 2003 – after striking a finance-stretching £250m deal to buy Warner Village UK’s 36 movie theatres, transforming Vue into the Britain’s second-biggest chain overnight – Richards and his backers have enjoyed a string of lucrative deals in which Vue has been acquired by new owners over the past two decades.
However, his most recent life-saving deal – a £1bn restructuring in January that wiped out the value of the equity held by Vue’s owners and the 26% stake held by management – was not one of those moments.
“I personally lost a lot of money,” says Richards. “The goal was to save everyone who helped build the company: we have 5,000 employees here and 9,500 across Europe, and nobody was let go, so I think we succeeded in that. We’ve got a cleaned-up balance sheet, we’ve got new money in, and we haven’t abandoned a single site.”
While the World Health Organization officially heralded the end of Covid as a global emergency this month, the health of the global cinema industry remains fragile.
London-listed Cineworld, the world’s second-largest chain, is battling to exit bankruptcy protection in the US, having been unable to finance a $5bn (£4bn) debt pile. And the market value of AMC, the world’s largest chain and owner of Odeon in the UK, continues to languish at just a third of its pre-pandemic level.
“My view hasn’t changed: the next 12 to 18 months is going to be a period of consolidation,” says Richards. “A lot of companies are for sale – such as in Australia, the Middle East and France. A number of high-quality chains that are struggling post-pandemic are up for sale. We are not out of the woods yet.”
For Richards, who took the almost-obligatory look at Cineworld’s assets when a US bankruptcy process forced its owners to at least consider a sale, risking losing everything in pursuit of success is part of his makeup.
The son of a Canadian trade commissioner, he spent the first 10 years of his life in Brazil before leaving school in his teens to pursue his dream of being a world-class downhill skier, with the aim of making the Canadian Olympic team.
He spent three years dedicated to the cause, working on oil rigs to pay for coaching, before eventually realising he wasn’t going to quite make the grade. “Technically I’m a high school dropout,” he says. “I tried very hard and left school to train full-time. If I hadn’t tried for the Canadian dream, I would have regretted it for the rest of my life.”
He returned to education as a mature student, gaining a degree in political science and economics, followed by law school, which led to a job at the major law firm Freshfields in mergers and acquisitions. However, the recession of the early 1990s meant M&A work was thin on the ground: “It was a great job, I loved the firm, but there was nothing to do.”
A job ad in the Financial Times for a role at an unnamed studio would ultimately change his life.
After 11 interviews, Richards landed the post at UCI, a cinema chain joint-venture between the Hollywood studios Paramount and Universal, and by the mid-1990s he had gone full Hollywood, moving to Los Angeles in a business development role for Warner Bros.
Seeing his employer’s cinema chain, Warner Village, described as a “non-core asset” in parent company Time Warner’s 1998 annual report provided him with his next risk-it-all moment. “The writing was on the wall,” he says. “I saw what studio life was like. I thought I could do something different and for a fraction of the price.”
Richards, whose first experience of film on the big screen was sneaking into a cinema in Rio de Janeiro as a seven-year-old and seeing To Kill a Mockingbird, managed to raise enough money to buy six cinemas.
The first opened in Livingston, Scotland, in 2000, but Richards always had his eye on making a deal for Warner Village; three years later he did, stretching his business to near-bankruptcy to form Vue. “I went from a garage to a small office above a Greek restaurant in Chiswick through to where we are today,” says the indefatigable 64-year-old. “And I have no intention of slowing down.”
Indeed, the slow lane is not a place one would expect to find Richards: he is about to indulge his love of motorsport, competing in a Lamborghini in a race at a forthcoming event at Silverstone. “I’ve probably got one year left in me because I am still racing against 17-year-olds,” says Richards, who obtained his racing licence back when he was living in California.
These days based in London, he lives with his wife, Sylvie, whom he met at law school, and has three children – none of whom work in the glitzy world of film. “None of them have followed me into the business,” he says. “I think it is important to carve your own path and find your own way, which they are all doing very successfully.”
And as for the business of cinema, it is slowly but surely getting back to full steam. While this year will still see about 20% fewer releases than pre-pandemic, and the UK box office is forecast by analysts Omdia to come in around £200m below 2019’s record levels, next year is expected to be almost back to business as usual – the impact of the current screenwriters’ strike notwithstanding.
The almost-funereal atmosphere that pervaded in the industry during the pandemic, when Hollywood studios bypassed cinemas with digital releases direct to fans, has dissipated, as that great experiment proved commercially unsuccessful for most films.
Richards points to an almost-complete volte-face – with even streamers Apple and Amazon committing $1bn annual budgets to making films for big-screen release – as proof cinema is back.
“Covid actually proved that the cinema model is not broken,” says Richards, who has one eye on a Hollywood-style comeback for Vue in the form of a potential stock market flotation in the future. “The audiences are there. They never left us.”
