Is this the beginning of the end for Silverbird Cinemas?

We all know that there comes a moment in a protagonist’s life when a tragic flaw marks the destruction of a personality once loved by many and desired by many more.

As far as I can tell, Silverbird Cinema is not a new player in Nigeria’s cinema business. In fact, the reverse is the case given the cinema’s pioneering position in the rise of the Nigerian cinema culture.

However, in recent times, a lot of reports and disturbing whispers have been constantly drifting across my halls of observation and this clearly reached it peak today on February 18, 2012.

It was a weekend and I had a meeting at the Silverbird Cinemas. Well, all went so well that I decided to wrap it up with a good movie and I ended up watching Safe House (starring Densel Washington and Ralph…).

After seeing the movie and was on my way out of the cinema, I decided to take a leak and this was when a friend called my attention to the poor maintenance culture at the Silverbird Cinemas.

When I visually followed my friend’s hand to the direction it was pointed at, I saw it and I had to blink twice to make sure it was true. There was a leak on the cinema’s topmost floor and the more I looked at it, the more I realised that the decay in the structure was far from being recent.

While some might tag this to be a wake up call to Silverbird Cinema, others might go as far as tagging it a witch-hunting exercise.

Well, whatever it is called, the truth is that for some time now, I have had to listen and endure the complaint of Nigerians who strongly believed that the Silver Cinema was on a steady decline in terms of the crowd statistics the cinema now records compared to what obtained when it just started operations. Also, the visible decay in the cinema’s edifice along Ahmadu Bello Way, Victoria Island, Lagos has also been a matter of grave concern.

Like the elders say, a word is enough for the wise.