‘It was apocalyptic’: Tim Richards of Vue on cinema’s collapse and comeback

theguardian.com:

T im 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