Nicki Wilson was shocked when her local newspaper reported in March 2023 that the Triplex Theater, an independent four-screen movie house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was shutting down after almost three decades in business.

The Triplex, the only theater in town, was a much-loved fixture, attracting moviegoers from all around the Berkshires, even on winter nights when not much else was open, Wilson said.

“I couldn’t imagine living in a town without a movie theater,” she said.

Wilson wasn’t the only one who felt this way, and after a communitywide campaign, the Triplex reopened in November 2023 in a much different form: The Triplex has become a nonprofit organization relying on donations, grants and plenty of volunteer labor. And instead of leaning on the next Hollywood blockbuster, the Triplex focuses on what the community wants to see.

“In an independent theater, you can show what you want,” said Gail Lansky, vice president of the Triplex’s board. “You can show retrospectives. You can show foreign films. You can do film festivals. Free Saturdays for kids.”

Certainly not all nonprofit theaters are doing well, but the model has worked, at least so far, in places like the Berkshires, where a devoted and well-heeled clientele is willing and able to support the arts.

Across the country, more than 250 movie theaters are nonprofits, said Bryan Braunlich, executive director of the Cinema Foundation, a movie-industry group that provides research for cinemas.

“We are definitely seeing a trend of communities rallying around their local theaters,” he said.

And movie theaters have needed saving. From 2019 to 2023, the number of screens operating in the United States declined 12%, to 36,369, said David Hancock, chief analyst in media and entertainment at research firm Omdia. The popularity of at-home streaming over the past decade was a factor, but COVID-19 nearly dealt the industry a death blow.

“People certainly came back, but much more slowly,” said the Triplex’s former owner, Richard Stanley. “Ultimately, I saw the handwriting on the wall and decided I had to close.”

When a theater shuts down, it’s not just a problem for film buffs. Because of their unique architecture, with sloped floors and few windows, they are hard to convert to other purposes.

Becoming a nonprofit allows theaters to draw on different revenue sources, like film festivals, and the hope is that a theater catering to the people of a town will build a loyal and supportive base.

By 2023, two other multiplexes in the Berkshires, in Lanesborough and North Adams, had already shut down. But Wilson believed there was hope for the Triplex.

She didn’t have $1 million to buy the theater from Stanley, but she did have plenty of friends. In April 2023, she invited her neighbors to discuss saving the theater. The group created a GoFundMe page and a website to raise money.

Within a few months, the group had raised $246,000 — enough to pay the first year’s mortgage. Stanley liked the idea of keeping the Triplex alive as a nonprofit run by the town’s residents and gave Wilson’s group a five-year mortgage to buy the theater.