ABOVE: Tim Jertson walks through theater five at Fairmont 5 Theatres, as he describes the theater rental program which has started to pick up steam.

FAIRMONT – With around four years under their belt since reopening, the Fairmont 5 Theatres is branching out with a theater rental program.

While technically the program has been around since the theater first opened, multiple factors have prevented it from being fully realized.

“We waited about a year and a half, year and three quarters to make sure we could start rebuilding the business, because it had been down for a few years with no movie theater in town,” Manager Tim Jertson said. “It’s the sort of thing that takes some time to build up awareness in the community.”

The program allows one of the theater’s screens to be rented on an hourly basis. This includes watching movies from a laptop or DVD player, audio/visual plug-ins for business meetings and, most recently, the ability to play video games.

“We’ve had people bring their Xboxes, their Playstations,” Jertson said. “We’ve even had a young lady who rented the space out for two hours for her boyfriend’s birthday, and the two of them brought his giant gaming computer from home and set it up. You got two USBs, two USB-Cs, a network cable, and the HDMI that all connect and run through the ceiling up to the projection booth, and then allows us to play both sound and video on the big screen.”

For the business, Jertson said it is an additional way to help keep things going in a rural area.

“It’s an additional revenue stream,” he said. “When you’re running a small business in a small town, every additional revenue stream is warranted, and in some cases, almost necessary. It’s a nice opportunity.”

For the people, Jertson said it provides opportunities for youth in the area that their parents would otherwise have to take them elsewhere to experience.

“We don’t have enough of a population to have those Wow Zone, Chuck E Cheese, those sorts of things.”

Generally, these events are held on weekend mornings, in theater five before the first screenings start. With summer approaching, Jertson said they will be able to open more slots during the week and later into the mornings.

With the recent renovations made to the theater, including the new seats, he said they have seen a rise in adoption for the program that has changed how they analyze it.

“We’ll have done on average, three or four a month in 2026, so far,” Jertson said. “We didn’t use to measure them quarterly. We used to measure how many we did last year. And now it’s gotten to the point where we’re able to start looking at how we’re doing quarterly.”

This rise in success is attributed by Jertson to the program being spread by word of mouth and social media.

Looking forward, Jertson said they are hoping to see a continued rise in usage for this burgeoning program.

“We’re hoping that we’ll just continue to grow exponentially,” he said. “The more parties we have, the more people get to experience it, the more they find out how fun it is.”

On the movie side, Jertson said the big new release is The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. He said the movie was released on a Wednesday, which is a very unusual day of the week for a release, but it has had sold-out showings regardless.

For more information on the program, visit fairmont5.com/private-showings.html.