George Levesque was standing in the Duncan Auditorium at Tampa Theatre, looking toward the balcony, which curves around the room and comes within 25 feet of the stage. He had been explaining why stand-up comedians liked performing here, and the more he talked, the clearer it became that the theater’s original architect, John Eberson, had done the modern comedy business a considerable favor.
Among the comedians drawn to the theater was Sam Morril, whose three sold-out performances had been filmed for a Netflix special. Morril could have booked a larger venue for a single show, Levesque explained, although there were advantages to performing in a room where the audience was close enough to see the comedian’s expressions and the comedian could see how people were responding.
“Think of Sam that night,” Levesque said. “He’s sitting out here, and look, he can see faces. He can connect all the way to the back of the auditorium. He could have gone somewhere bigger and done one show, but he did it in here. It’s a more intimate setting, and you think about those comedians. It was in small rooms where they got going, and they want that feedback.”
“And it ain’t ugly,” he added.
The auditorium resembles a Mediterranean courtyard after dark, complete with balconies, elaborate façades and a ceiling illuminated to look like the night sky. Eberson designed it when the American movie business was booming and theater owners were competing to build increasingly elaborate places for people to watch pictures. Tampa Theatre opened Oct. 15, 1926, with a silent film, The Ace of Cads, and an admission price of 25 cents. Uniformed ushers greeted customers, who could enjoy the comfort of air conditioning, a considerable attraction in Florida at the time.
Eberson drew inspiration from the Florida landscape, which he had come to know during several winters in the state. He used that experience to develop his atmospheric theaters, including Tampa Theatre, where audiences could watch movies beneath an artificial night sky.
Customers could enjoy the spectacle of the building before the picture began, and the elaborate surroundings helped make an evening at the movies feel different from other forms of entertainment. A century later, Tampa Theatre is still selling that experience, although the movies now compete for space on the calendar with comedians, musicians and other performers who appear beneath Eberson’s artificial sky.
Levesque became Tampa Theatre’s president and CEO in June, arriving during a $24.5 million restoration that had closed the Duncan Auditorium for seven months. He had previously managed the Paramount Theatre, another atmospheric movie palace, in Abilene, Texas, and knew what came with running a building whose architectural details are nearly impossible to reproduce using ordinary construction methods.
“Businesswise, this is an interesting business,” he said. “A huge percentage of the operating income that we get is from you coming to a Sam Morril concert, you buying some popcorn, you being in the theater. It’s earned income. So it operates somewhat as a business, but at the same time, you walk through there, that doesn’t make sense. Nobody’s going to build a modern theater like that, where it takes 20 people to help people find their seats and get through the front doors.”
Levesque estimates that between 60% and 75% of the theater’s operating income comes from programming and other activities that bring in money. Devin Dominguez, meanwhile, has spent much of her time raising the money needed to preserve the building where those performances take place.
As the theater’s vice president and director of development, Dominguez is overseeing a campaign whose first restoration phase cost approximately $24.5 million, with another $6.2 million in improvements being considered and a proposed $22 million endowment to help pay for repairs in the years ahead. She describes the Second Century Campaign as an undertaking of approximately $50 million, although the current estimates for all three phases add up to $52.7 million.
“Frankly, the for-profit movie industry, I don’t know how much longer it will be,” Dominguez said. “I really think that the future of film in movie theaters is nonprofit. I don’t see how the economics could work moving forward at this point.”
Television was already drawing audiences away from movie theaters by the 1950s, while suburban development was taking customers away from the downtown districts where the great movie palaces had been built. The elaborate buildings became increasingly expensive to maintain as attendance declined, and many disappeared when the land beneath them became more valuable than the theaters themselves.
Tampa Theatre was facing demolition in 1973 when residents organized to save it, community leaders got involved and the City Council arranged to buy and preserve the building. It reopened in January 1977 with public support and eventually came to be operated by a nonprofit organization. The National Park Service added Tampa Theatre to the National Register of Historic Places on Jan. 3, 1978.
Since its rescue, the theater has welcomed more than 5 million visitors, including approximately 1 million schoolchildren attending educational programs and field trips, according to its official history. It now opens its doors more than 1,000 times a year for screenings, performances, tours and other activities.
The John T. Taylor Screening Room, which opened in June 2024, was the first expansion in the theater’s history. Its 43 seats are slightly roomier than those in the main auditorium, with end caps modeled on the original 1926 furnishings, and its Dolby surround-sound system has the equipment needed to show new releases.
Movie distributors generally take a negotiated percentage of ticket sales and expect theaters to show their films for a certain number of days. When deciding where to place a movie, a distributor may prefer a multiplex with several screens, especially if it can guarantee a full week of screenings. Tampa Theatre had to work around a crowded schedule in which a profitable Saturday-night performance could interrupt a film’s run.
“Beforehand, it was, ‘We want to show your movie here, but we can only show it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Saturday, we’ve got somebody else,'” Levesque recalled. “And it was really hard for them to get three or four days of a movie in there.”
“Suddenly, with two screens, we can promise them seven days,” Levesque said, “and it might be three or four days in here, and if it’s doing really well, we move it in there and we get a bigger crowd.”
The Taylor room also stayed open during the seven-month restoration, allowing Tampa Theatre to continue showing films while its 1,200-seat auditorium was closed. With so much of its revenue coming from people buying tickets and attending performances, the second screen helped the theater keep some business going during construction.
Showing movies can be expensive even for theaters that operate on a much larger scale. AMC Entertainment, the country’s largest theater chain, spent 51.2% of its domestic ticket revenue on film exhibition costs in 2025. On a hypothetical $20 ticket, that would leave $9.76 before the theater paid its employees, utility bills and other expenses.
Food and beverage sales brought in approximately $1.34 billion for AMC in 2025, compared with $1.99 billion from ticket sales. The company spent about 18% of its domestic concession revenue on food and beverage costs, leaving much of that money available to help pay for the rest of the business. Its customers spent an average of $8.57 per visit on food and drinks.
AMC sold approximately 155.8 million tickets in the U.S. in 2025, down from 156.9 million the year before. Higher ticket prices still pushed revenue up 3.9%, even as fewer people went to the movies.
Independent cinemas participating in an Art House Convergence analysis reported a more encouraging trend, with box-office revenue increasing 8.8% from a year earlier and 38% compared with 2019, according to figures from Rentrak released in June. Those figures cover participating theaters and measure ticket revenue rather than profit.
The organization also surveyed more than 27,000 moviegoers at over 50 independent cinemas, finding that 88% described their favorite theater as a cultural hub and 73% valued it as a place where people could discuss important community issues. Nearly one in four respondents had started going to their preferred cinema within the previous three years, and the average age among these newer customers was 40, compared with 51 for everyone surveyed.
The people who responded were already interested in independent movie theaters, so their answers don’t necessarily tell us how most Americans choose where to see a film. Independent cinemas also include both nonprofit and commercial theaters, and the findings don’t establish which type is more likely to succeed financially.
Levesque had noticed something similar about the atmosphere inside the Taylor Screening Room. During one screening he attended, about 40 people began laughing together, talking back to the picture and responding to one another as though they were watching a movie with friends. Several had arrived as strangers, and after the film some decided to go out for drinks together.
“You come in here, you see people around, you meet people, you talk to people in line,” Levesque said. “I go to the new movie theaters, too, but you kind of have your hoodie, and you can hide and watch your movie, and then you leave. There’s something about that connection. We all need it.”
Classic films such as Casablanca draw audiences to the Duncan Auditorium, while new independent releases play in the Taylor room. Management can organize discussions around screenings and show films that might have trouble attracting enough customers at a larger commercial theater.
“Our goals don’t have to be about making money on every single event,” Levesque said. “It can be, what does the community need? What do we need to show? Who needs to be on our stage? What kind of film does this community need to see?”
Ticket sales, performances and other programs brought Tampa Theatre $3.99 million in fiscal 2025, about $740,000 more than the year before. The theater also received $2.43 million in donations and grants. Its financial statements show $6.68 million coming in that year, with $5.50 million going out.
That left a surplus of about $1.19 million on paper, although some donations may have been restricted to particular uses. The $24.5 million restoration was another matter. Paying for a project that large meant turning to donors, since the theater couldn’t come close to covering the cost with what it earned from its regular operations.
Inside the Duncan Auditorium, workers spent seven months repairing elaborate plasterwork and restoring decorative finishes that had been changed during earlier renovations. Evergreen Architectural Arts, the company hired for the decorative restoration, used forensic paint analysis to identify the original colors and recreate details that had been changed or covered up over the years.
Some of the colors had been painted in the wrong places during previous restorations. That mattered because Eberson had worked out where each color belonged based on how the theater would be lit, and even a small change could make the plasterwork look different.
Even the artificial greenery required some detective work. Workers examined historic black-and-white photographs to figure out the size and placement of plants that had once decorated the auditorium. Staff members then photographed possible replacements in black and white, comparing the shades of gray with the old pictures to see whether the plants looked like those earlier audiences would have seen.
Levesque said the changes in paint placement have altered the way light moves through the auditorium, although the overall colors still look familiar, particularly to visitors who remember the theater before the restoration.
Workers also repaired or replaced parts of the plumbing and electrical systems, while plans included improvements to heating, cooling and accessibility. With a building this old and so many specialized craftsmen involved, nobody could know exactly what the work would cost until contractors began opening things up.
“When the plaster breaks, it’s not like you just call somebody down the street to come fix it,” Levesque said. “You’ve got to bring somebody in from out of state who knows how to do that.”
Even some of the old electrical equipment remains in place long after the theater stopped using it. “Some of the wiring you’ll find isn’t even insulated,” he said. “It’s not being used anymore, but it’s an old building.”
Dominguez knew contractors might discover expensive problems once they started opening the walls, so she added some extra money to the fundraising goal for the first phase.
“I built in a little bit of a fundraising buffer because when your building is 100 years old and you don’t know what you’re going to cut into a wall, you might end up with a really expensive problem,” she said. “I didn’t want to go back to donors and say, ‘Surprise, I need another $250,000.'”
By October, when the Duncan Auditorium reopened for Tampa Theatre’s centennial celebration, the organization had raised approximately $24.25 million toward its $24.5 million goal for the first phase. Dominguez said the money raised had covered the bills so far and the project was running slightly under budget, although contractors still had some work to finish.
“We’re not done, there’s still work going on, but at the moment, knock on wood, we’re a little under budget,” she said.
The restoration also includes turning approximately 3,600 square feet of space that wasn’t being used much into the Jackie Price Education Center, giving the theater dedicated classrooms for film education and other activities that previously had to compete for space with regular programming.
Tampa Theatre has offered summer film camps for years, teaching children to make their own movies and giving them an opportunity to screen what they’ve made. Levesque described a program in which students arrive on Monday and return by Friday with films they’ve produced themselves. With permanent classrooms, the theater hopes to offer programs throughout the year and begin offering more classes for adults.
Dominguez has also discussed teaching media literacy, including how to recognize AI-generated material and understand how moving images are created. Donors have shown interest in the education center, and management hopes to offer more classes without continually taking time away from the Duncan Auditorium, where a live performance or popular movie can bring in considerably more ticket revenue.
Another $6.2 million in work is planned for the next phase of the Second Century Campaign, including better access to the stage for people with disabilities, more space for public programs and restoration of the theater’s Wurlitzer organ. Dominguez said management had put off some decisions until Levesque arrived, and costs could rise depending on what work they choose to do and when construction begins.
The Wurlitzer’s approximately 1,400 pipes originally accompanied silent films at Tampa Theatre, but the arrival of talking pictures eventually made the organ less necessary. It was retired and sold to Bayshore Baptist Church before volunteers helped bring it back to the theater in the 1980s. The organ is still used for performances, although management now wants to give it a more thorough restoration.
After that construction, Dominguez hopes to raise $22 million for an endowment that would help pay for maintenance in the years ahead. The money would be invested, and Tampa Theatre could use some of the annual returns to pay for repairs instead of having to organize another large fundraising campaign every time something expensive needed fixing.
If the full $22 million were raised and the theater spent 4% of the fund each year, it would have approximately $880,000 annually for maintenance. At 5%, that would increase to $1.1 million, although the actual amount available would depend on how the investments performed, the theater’s spending rules and any restrictions donors placed on their contributions.
“That’s insurance,” Dominguez said. “That means this building stays around forever. You get that endowment there, and suddenly, ‘Oh no, this is broken.’ We can fix it, even if it is $1 million. We’ve got some mechanism to do that.”
Dominguez has a favorite saying about nonprofits that she thinks applies especially well to Tampa Theatre.
“Being a nonprofit is a tax status. It’s not a business model,” she said.
Tampa Theatre still depends on customers buying tickets and spending money when they come to see a show, but fundraising gives management another way to pay for repairs that would be difficult to cover through ticket sales alone.
“You don’t have to constantly think about the bottom line in the same way, because you can supplement your funding sources,” Dominguez said. “Here we can focus on the experience and what’s best for a 100-year-old building in a way that others can’t.”