by Ian Elliot
Northern News Services

NNSL (Dec 15/97) - Iqaluit has joined the North American movie premiere circuit.

When Wes Craven's new horror flick, Scream 2, blasted across thousands of North American screens for the first time on Friday night, one of them was in Iqaluit. It marked Baffin Island town's entrance onto the first-run circuit, and the Astro Theatre is now the most northerly cinema in the world showing first-run films.

Or at least the good ones, says owner Bryan Pearson.

"They might be showing first-run films in Russia, but they're not showing Scream 2, that's for sure," stated Pearson last week.

Technically, it isn't the first time a first-run movie has played in Iqaluit. A special screening of Mortal Kombat was arranged when it first came out, but Pearson, a transplanted Liverpool resident who gives chatty reviews of the current attractions on his box-office answering machine, says it will happen more often from now on.

"We happened to be in the right place at the right time," he says of the Scream 2 premiere. "We caught the eye of Alliance, and they liked the idea of having the movie here."

"We will get more (first-run features), but only if the terms are right."

By the right terms he means films that the theatre doesn't have to keep for a long time. To get some movies, a theatre has to agree to show them for five weeks, which is no problem for a suburban multi-screen facility in the south, but too long for small communities that need a regular turnover of fresh movies.

That meant that theatres in places like Iqaluit far from the regular first-run circuit had to wait until a theatre in the South finished showing a film.

Pearson says Mortal Kombat sold out several times over and the town is already abuzz over Scream 2, he said.

"The kids just love it," he said. "They're crazy about it."

And although his first-run movies do tend to lean more towards gore and gladiators, Pearson says no one is complaining.

"That censorship thing is over," he said.

"The kids see far more sex and violence on television than they see at the movies."