Many community members over the years have shown their massive support for Livermore’s finest movie theater experience through displays of classic and independent films, film festivals, and Oscar parties. The very well-known Vine Cinema has been open since December 1956.
In 2007, when faced with the challenge of needing to compete with the new large theater in town, many business owners would’ve given up, but this wasn’t an option for Kenny Way, the longtime and current owner of the Vine.
“We realized that we needed to adapt to the changes or we were going to go out of business, and that’s when we introduced beer, wine and food, independent films, classics and later on adding couches in the theaters to differentiate ourselves from the competition,”
Way said. With the transition from film to digital, Vine has been fortunate enough to put on many live sporting events. The Vine has had the most success screening the 49ers playoff games.
“We have been traditionally showing sports events for over ten years, we haven’t shown that many games but more than any other fanbase, the Niners fans do a great job of coming out and showing to support their team”, Way said.
With their two most impressive and toughest comeback wins of the season, the Niners have punched their way back into the Super Bowl the defending champions, Kansas City Chiefs—a familiar rematch of the Big Game from 2020. A year that brought the world to a full halt and unfortunately made a negative impact on a lot of businesses that were forced to close their doors for good. We were forced to social distance till it was deemed safe. Many of those places couldn’t pay their rent or find ways to stay open or reopen after the forced closures.
This wasn’t the first time the Vine had pushed through adversity. Week after week, many familiar faces throughout the community showed their incredible support by showing love for the Cinema.
After incredible help from GoFundMe donations, weekend sales of Popcorn, cotton candy, snow cones, and more, Kenny was able to keep the Livermore landmark open after 14 straight months of closure.
“Movie theaters are a tough business right now because they haven’t fully rebounded from COVID and the writers’ strike didn’t help much at all either. So it is tough. “We were worried about not coming back, after COVID but in general terms, just follow your passion and just do what you love and something good may come out of it, “ Way said.
The Vine Theater has always been a unique and personal experience, showing a variety of movies for the diverse society we have.
“It has been nice to get different groups of people in here and not just the same people that like to see our independent films, you know classic nights bring in a separate genre of people as well as many of the sporting events that we show that bring in a whole nother different type of people,” said Way. “My hope is that they might see a flyer on the wall and that they may come back for another film or event, to come to watch Dirty Dancing or the new Bob Marley film or whatever that is coming up.”
“We have shown a lot of games a long time ago, not have been able to do as many as we’re used to because of strict film contracts but have been very lucky to be able to show all the playoff games this month and now the Super Bowl,” said Way.
“As the games ramp up more and more people come out to these playoff games, with their team’s incredible success, it was about 90% full the previous week against the Packers and it seemed like it was full for the NFC championship game,” Way said, noting that he anticipated good numbers for the Super Bowl, too, since the word is getting out about The Vine. put out there that the big game is approaching us.
Way invites everyone to come out to The Vine for future events.
