BRATTLEBORO-Remember when going to the movies was what people did on a weekend? Jon Potter does.
Potter, who is responsible for the Latchis Theatre, calls those days the “Seinfeld School of Moviegoing.”
“There were so many episodes of Seinfeld where they would all gather in Jerry’s apartment on Friday evening to figure out their plans,” Potter said of the television comedy show, and its four protagonists, that ran from 1989 to 1998.
“Someone would say, ‘Let’s go to the movies.’ And they went, without having any idea what they were going to see until they got there. That doesn’t happen anymore.”
Potter is the executive director of Latchis Corporation and Latchis Arts Inc., the two entities that respectively own and operate the Latchis Memorial Building in Brattleboro. In his care is the Latchis Theatre, an Art Deco masterpiece of a movie theater, as well as the 30-room Latchis Hotel and stores, office spaces for rent, and a restaurant.
Since the pandemic, movie theaters across the nation have reported a significant decline in attendance: between 40% and 46%. At the Latchis, it is a dramatic 50% audience loss over 10 years.
“For every movie theater in the country, including the Latchis, business is way down from a decade ago,” Potter said. “And I’m pretty convinced that it’s not coming back.”
Movies now have to be an event, a destination, or something special, not a fallback position for an evening’s entertainment.
“You have to have a reason to leave your home and choose a specific movie to go to,” Potter said. “Our challenge at the Latchis is to create as many reasons for people to make us their destination as possible. We want to continue to be a showcase for first-run and indie films that fit the bill.
“People get excited about Wicked and Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another. Cinema is still a powerful art form. But there are other compelling options competing for people’s attention.”
What caused such a precipitous drop in attendance? Was it the pandemic, when people no longer wanted to be in enclosed places with strangers? Or streaming, when a large volume of first-class entertainment became available in people’s living rooms? Have demographics played a part? People in Windham County are getting older, and driving at night can be a problem for older moviegoers.
“The pandemic was certainly an accelerator,” Potter said. “But I think the trend had already begun just before the pandemic, as streaming platforms came more and more online. So in some ways, the pandemic sort of locked it in and accelerated the trend.
“People got out of the habit of going to the movies,” he continued. “People got into the habit of seeing amazing content in their living rooms. And all those platforms are putting out great stuff.”
That audiences choose to stay home is not the full story behind the attendance drop at the Latchis. Slowly and stealthily, the Brattleboro area has become a center of performing arts. For example, Next Stage Arts in Putney and the New England Youth Theatre, Epsilon Spires, the Stone Church, and the Vermont Jazz Center in Brattleboro are all regularly presenting live entertainment, and they are all competing for the entertainment dollar.
“The Latchis is lucky, from a certain standpoint,” Potter said. “Because of the hotel, we celebrate and benefit greatly from having those other great things in our community. People come and stay with us and then go to the Stone Church.”
An unusual corporate structure
The Latchis employs two dozen people, full and part time, most of them in housekeeping. It has a complex operating structure with two boards.
“We have a nonprofit organization that owns a for-profit corporation,” Potter explained. “The hotel and the commercial contracts with the studios and the movie business, all parts of the theater, are under the corporate umbrella.”
So are the leased spaces, whose tenants include Sages Pub; Evan James Jewelers; Express Fluency, a language school; and the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation, which maintains a satellite office for workforce development. Those are all under the corporation’s umbrella.
“The nonprofit does the fun stuff, like the partnerships to make live events happen,” Potter said. “They do the fundraising to help support those live events. The large capital campaign that did the seats and the ceiling — that was led by the nonprofit. We’re very lucky here that the two entities play very well together.
“My position would be completely untenable if there was a turf war, but it’s a very respectful, mutual relationship,” he added.
The hotel drives the rest of the businesses.
“People identify us with the theater, but the real engine that keeps the building going is the hotel,” Potter said. “Local people today don’t even know that we have a hotel. And business in the hotel has been growing and essentially supporting everything that’s happening here.”
The future is live
With the movie audience shrinking, Potter and his two boards have had to figure out a viable path for the future. After much strategic planning in sessions and in private conversations, they decided to do more — much more — of what they had already been doing: live events.
“If the amount of your pie shrinks, you don’t shrink the pie to meet what you have left,” Potter said. “You try to fill in the empty slices, if you can accept that rather lame metaphor.”
The Latchis had already been hosting live events, special events, and special programs.
“When you talk to people who come here and love the Latchis, the nights that they really remember are the Sing Nowells and the a cappella concerts and the big shows,” Potter said. “So we already had the chops.”
The new formula is working. The Latchis calendar is now full of live events.
There’s a yearly Wagner in Vermont festival, produced by Tundi Productions, the nonprofit led by Hugh Keelan and Jenna Rae, which takes up the main theater for a month and draws its audience from all over the country. In a bout of synergy, many of the attendees also rent rooms in the hotel.
In 2025, there was live music from touring musicians such as Leo Kottke, Cherish the Ladies, and Livingston Taylor.
There were independent films that included audience question-and-answer sessions with such creators as English screenwriter and director Mike Leigh. There have been many film festivals, many offering discussions afterward by the films’ creators.
And of course, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a 1975 film that has turned into a full audience participation ritual, remains a late-night staple.
Although the Bolshoi Ballet seems to have stopped livestreaming, the Latchis still simulcasts live performances from the Metropolitan Opera.
And there were many local events. The Brattleboro School of Dance did The Nutcracker at Christmas. Sandglass Theater’s Puppets in the Green Mountains festival took over in September. The Brattleboro Concert Choir, the Windham Philharmonic, and Sing Nowell all did shows at the Latchis.
There were live professional comedy shows by comedians like Michael Cruz Kayne and Paula Poundstone.
And there were many political evenings organizing community discussions centered around films about the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war.
“I think the re-election of Donald Trump was another thought provoking moment for me,” Potter said. “It really changed my thinking around what a theater could and should be doing in this moment.”
He asked himself: “How do we meet a moment that’s really tough and stressful, particularly on our ‘Blue’ community, but on our country as a whole?”
“So I began to think of the Latchis as not just a marketplace of cinema, but as a place where the First Amendment lived and breathed,” Potter said. “It could be a marketplace of ideas and conversation and democracy and helping people figure out the world.”
People wanted meaning. They wanted conversation. They wanted to be together, even if it was to deal with difficult issues.
“So thinking of the Latchis in terms of a pretty crucial place for people to get together and express and talk about ideas and concepts and to really be thinking beyond cinema — anything that the First Amendment might champion — was very important to me,” Potter said. “And I think that’s been part of what our success has been.”
For example, the Latchis screened what might be considered a pro-Putin film about the Ukraine war.
“It was a different telling of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, of the more pro-Putin version of things,” Potter said. “Oliver Stone was involved in it. We had people walk out, and we had other people push back, but for me it was important to show it.”
Finding new partners, approaches
All told, the main stage was used for more than 90 live performances in 2025. Going into 2026, Potter has already booked more than 30 until September, with many more on the way.
“We have a relationship with the Stone Church now where, if they ever land somebody who’s too big for their hall, they’ll pitch us,” Potter said. “We’re working on establishing relationships with people who are booking venues in Northampton and other other places.”
People frequently bring programming ideas to the Latchis.
“They come to us still and again,” Potter said. “I think work begets work. When the word is out that the Latchis is very interested in doing more live events, or having more independent filmmakers, then the woodwork comes alive.”
For one example, Potter was talking to Danny Lichtenfeld, the executive director of the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. He recommended an independent film, Secret Mall Apartment, about artists in Providence who lived in a secret apartment in a mall for several years.
Lichtenfeld connected Potter and the film’s producer and director, Jeremy Workman, “and off we went,” Potter said.
“And that was the ninth best movie of 2025 in terms of sales for us, which was astounding,” he noted. “I think it’s proof of our amazingly unique community that a sleepy little documentary like that outsold Avatar. It kind of gives you encouragement.”
Potter also rents out one of the small theaters to family groups, a program that began during the pandemic to offer a cinematic experience to quarantine bubbles. Groups can enjoy films and even use the screen and the theater’s technology to play video games.
“We did about 800 private rentals,” Potter said. “People just came out of the woodwork for that. We did more kids’ birthday parties than Chuck E. Cheese ever did.”
So is not just blockbuster movies with muscled men in tights saving the world any more — although it is that, too.
“It’s a conscious choice and programming decision,” Potter said of the balance between the live programming and the first-run movies. “I don’t think of it as doing much more that’s different, except that we’re doing much more of it.”
“If you step out of the box that you’re in, if you put your toe out of the box enough times, you begin to realize that the box isn’t really relevant anymore,” Potter said. “And I think, in some ways, that’s what we’ve been doing.”
This Arts item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.