Tim Richards: The speed freak and movie lover behind Vue Cinemas

Way back in the Sixties, a seven-year-old Tim Richards sneaked into a rundown cinema in Rio de Janeiro for his earliest brush with the movies — and it sticks with him to this day.

The film was To Kill A Mockingbird, and Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning performance as lawyer Atticus Finch sparked a lifelong fascination with cinema.

“It absolutely terrified me. I wasn’t supposed to be watching it, I kind of snuck in,” he recalls. “I still remember scenes from it. Even now what do I do when I’m off work? I watch movies, professionally and personally.”

Richards runs Vue, the UK’s third-biggest cinema chain and part of the Vue International empire he founded. If really pressed on his favourite film of all time, he’ll say “Apocalypse Now is up there” although he’ll basically watch anything.

Not that you’d think the 57-year-old has that much time on his hands for films, having built a company from scratch in the years since he took the gamble of his life in 1999. That was when he swapped the big corner office at Warner Brothers for the start-up in the garage, convinced that he could do things better than the big boys.

Years later, Richards — the son of a Canadian trade commissioner who spent the first 10 years of his life in Brazil — is back in a plush office in Chiswick Park, although the walls are bare as Vue has only just moved in.

Things could have ended up quite differently for him, however. The self-confessed speed freak didn’t have much time for school or business in his youth, as he really wanted to be a downhill skier and had his sights on the Olympic team.

“I was probably every parent’s nightmare child because I left school to ski. I was racing internationally and I had a moment when I was 16 years old — I’d been missing a lot of classes, when I met the headmaster of our school. He told me I’d got to decide what was more important, skiing or school. That was the easiest question in the whole world but he didn’t like the answer.”

That Olympic ambition had Richards working on oil rigs to pay for the coaching but he matured too late for ski racing. He knew he wasn’t good enough to make it, “which is really tough to acknowledge to yourself”.

So in a complete change of direction, he put himself through McGill University in Montreal as a mature student, and then on to bar school in the US, landing a job at Freshfields as an M&A lawyer. But watching in awe as two partners argued fiercely about the minutiae of European competition law made him realise he didn’t have what it takes to be a top lawyer.

With the recession of the early Nineties also hurting, his eye fell on a small ad in the Financial Times for a position in a film studio. It was with UCI, the cinema-operating joint venture between Paramount and Universal Studios. It was his “dream job” and the beginning of eight years that took him to Warner Brothers’ studios in California as a vice-president for business development.

But there was something nagging away at him — maybe the entrepreneur’s gene that saw his father and grandfather run their own businesses. He was convinced he could do things better, and cheaper.

“Some entrepreneurs talk about the ‘eureka moment’. I had a lot of separate incidents,” he says. “The closest I had was when I was visiting the O2 cinema in Finchley Road when I was with Warner Brothers. Warner wanted us to create these nightclub-type cinemas with bright lights and music — and we had Pepsi at the time coming out of Daffy Duck’s mouth. This affluent couple looked inside, saw this nightclub and walked away. I thought at the time ‘we’re alienating the fastest growing demographic’.

“Then in 1998, in the Time Warner annual report, we were described as a “non-core asset”. That is never a good thing. It was right up front, in bold, not in the footnotes. I was selling more countries than we were entering.”

So he gave up the “perfect life” to go on his own, bunkered down in the garage in LA finding out who his real friends were. Half the people who wanted to know him when he was a Warner big cheese didn’t return his calls. But with the help of venture capitalists in Boston, he managed to scrape together the funds to buy six cinemas, the first of which opened in Livingston, Scotland, in 2000.

That was a start, but he was racking up thousands of air miles chasing the real prize — the Warner Village chain of 36 UK cinemas, which would give the business crucial critical mass. Those two years until the £250 million deal finally closed in 2003 were the worst; “living on the edge of the precipice”, as Richards puts it.

“When I moved over here, I had my entire net worth — not that much — the house mortgaged and the work permit. If the company hadn’t worked, it would have been out of the country.”

The City fees racked up trying to get the deal over the line nearly tanked the company. Now Vue has more than 200 cinemas — including 85 in the UK and Ireland — after a spree snapping up companies worldwide, with 90 million filmgoers every year. He and his team “analyse the crap out of everything”, pioneering stadium seating in cinemas, digital projectors and ultra-comfy VIP seats.

For Richards, his cinemas are about more than just films, which is why the UK arm is known as Vue Entertainment. They’ve worked with the likes of Queen and Genesis, done live comedy with Ross Noble and are trialling plug-and-play for gamers who want to use the big screen.

“When you watch kids play on a big screen with a 100k-watt digital surround system, instead of a 27-inch Mac, you can see a bit of the future. They are not time-sensitive — they will come out at 2am. You get a lot of students. The tech is in place today for gamers to play real time on our screen in Leicester Square and hook them up against a competitor in Roppongi, Tokyo, and Times Square in New York. It opens up an incredible new platform.”

Getting more out of the venues — as well as the broad spread of its markets — also acts as a hedge against Hollywood, which had a dire 2014 before James Bond and Star Wars came to the rescue.

Richards has his eye on more acquisitions as well as a float after appointing Rothschild to look at options. AMC, the chain owned by China’s Dalian Wanda, splashed £921 million on Guy Hands’ Odeon business in July, so dealmaking is afoot.

A float — at a rumoured £1.5 billion — would add to the already considerable wealth of Richard and Vue’s management, who own 27%. Two Canadian pension funds hold the rest.

His options are open: “If there was an opportunity and the stars were aligned and we thought IPO was the best course of action, we’d look at it very seriously.” But Vue is also exploring “outside of Europe” for its next big deal. “In the next three to five years, there will be three or four truly global operators and we will be one of them.”

The Vue team made pots of money in 2010 and 2013 from private-equity sales but “the one thing that you learn is that people work hard because they love what they do, not because they are motivated by money”. The “challenge is keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive”.

But the chief executive, who has three children and lives with his wife Sylvie in Richmond Park, does allow himself one indulgence with the trappings of wealth: he races 200mph Lamborghinis in the Blancpain GT series.

“When you’re racing cars, 99% commitment is not enough. When you’re on the track, work, family, problems, nothing gets into your head. When I get off the track, I feel like I’ve been on holiday for a week. Maybe it’s sad that’s a way to relax.”

Expect Vue to be going through the gears in the next few months as well.