At SEAMAX, Ketchikan’s new theater, there’s one movie playing: “Edge of the Wild.”
It’s an around 20 minute documentary-style production with drone footage across Alaska — and it’s a 4-D, multi-sense experience. The seats tilt and shake. Water sprays out of the arm rests to accompany footage of white water rafting in Hope. Wind blows in your face when you’re dog mushing in Seward. The seats vibrate like you’re on a bumpy dirt road on an ATV excursion in Ketchikan.
The ground floor theater can seat around 70 people. The main purpose of that theater is to show SEAMAX’s own movie, Edge of the Wild, produced just for this experience.
Travis Robbins is a partial owner of SEAMAX. He lives in Ketchikan, and says this idea was in the making for years.
“I’m one of those guys that just likes to write down ideas constantly, and it was just a dream,” he said.
Years ago, around 2017, he went to the Phoenix Zoo with his kids and watched “A Bug’s Life.” There, something clicked.
“It had, like, the butt ticklers and the spray water and stuff like that,” Robbins said. “I was like, man, if we could have something in Alaska where you did this and got to experience Alaska in this 4-D style thing, it would be epic.”
When the owners of the old Coliseum Theater announced they would be closing, Robbins already had the idea for SEAMAX. He thought they would have to construct a whole new building for it, but the old theater closing lined up perfectly with their plans. He says when they bought the building, they made a promise to the previous owners that it would remain, in some way, a movie theater. Robbins and his business partner, Mark Sivertsen, teamed up with two of their friends from the Lower 48, Mike Opatril and Lance Ziebarth, to fund the project and put their ideas into action.
And it didn’t come without setbacks. Last November, people broke in and vandalized the space, slashing the big screen they had just installed. For a while, they didn’t know if insurance would cover it — or how they would pay for it without any operating revenue.
“People think you can just go on, you know, Amazon.com and order a screen,” Robbins said. “It’s not that simple.”
Those screens are specific and expensive, and installation is a precarious process, said Ian Ziebarth, a project manager for SEAMAX.
“We’re not some big theater company out of the Lower 48 that, do this every day,” Ziebarth said. “We’re just regular people. We’re just people trying to figure out how to run a theater and make it as cool as possible for everybody… we have to learn the ropes of running a movie theater and getting all the best movies and all that for everybody.”
Some people were skeptical. They lashed out online, worried they were losing an important feature for locals for the sake of tourism dollars. Even as construction began, Robbins and Sivertsen mostly stayed quiet about it. The project moved quickly, with all of the construction and film production happening in less than a year. Some of that process entailed figuring things out on the fly.
“That’s why we had bit our tongues this whole time,” Robbins said. “We were really concerned that we were going to give people false promises. And, I mean, we got kind of beat up a little bit on it, on the social media aspect, but we had to just kind of ignore it.”
Robbins and Sivertsen say the movie does have local, community interest. The “Edge of the Wild” producer traveled across Alaska to get drone footage, and they hired a Ketchikan local to do narration. It’s a unique, jam-packed experience with a Ketchikan-focused, trivia style informational pre-show.
They recognize it is marketed toward tourists. Sivertsen said that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
“Tourism is, unfortunately, one of the driving markets here right now, and so you kind of got to work with the hand you’re dealt,” Sivertsen said.
He said he wants to bring in profit and make it a benefit to the community.
“The main thing is that we’re able to employ people year round,” Sivertsen said. “That’s my ultimate goal. One, to have a successful business, and two, to keep people employed.”
Sivertsen says they have been working with locals in every aspect of the project, from construction to social media to audio production. He hopes that the upstairs theater, which has been updated, will eventually show Hollywood movies and new releases. It’s unclear if that will include evenings in the summer, or just in the off-season.
Robbins says they need local support, and a successful summer, to make that happen.
“Without a different concept to keep the money coming into the theater, this thing would have been a parking garage or, like they say, another jewelry store,” Robbins said. “So I’m personally uber thankful that we’re able to keep a movie theater in Ketchikan. It’s going to take some, definitely some tourism money to keep it alive.”
They’re still figuring out what Hollywood movies they’re going to show and when. Robbins said they might show classic Christmas movies around the holidays, for example — but he wants the concept to be special, and to be utilized by the community. He said the previous theater often sat empty. He doesn’t want that.
“I know everyone’s like, ‘hey, like, we miss the movie theater,’ but we need you guys to show up too,” he said. “I mean, we’re gonna have to have people showing up to watch the Hollywood movies in order for it to make sense to keep the production going and stuff.”
SEAMAX is already selling tickets for this spring and summer, with shows beginning later this month. Tickets are available on their website.