PORTLAND, Ore. – Three disabled Oregonians have accepted the terms offered by movie theater giant Regal Entertainment Group, ending a five-year legal battle.
The settlement forces Regal to make 1,000 of its theaters wheelchair-friendly. The company has also agreed to retrofit three-fourths of the auditoriums in its five Portland-area theaters and one-fourth of those in Salem, after the three Oregon women agreed to dismiss their suit against Regal in federal district court in Portland.
The disabled women objected to the company’s stadium-style theaters, in which moviegoers enter the auditorium at the bottom of a large staircase and work their way up to the best seats.
Those in wheelchairs were forced to park in the front row, where they had to crane their necks to watch the show, the three women said.
According to the terms of the agreement, new Regal theaters will be designed with wheelchair seating in the middle rows or farther back.
The disabled women – Kathy Stewmon of Forest Grove, Tina Smith Argetsinger of Portland and Kathy Braddy of Toledo – had the choice to press Regal for retrofits in more of its 6,273 auditoriums nationwide, said Kathy Wilde, their attorney and litigation director of the Oregon Advocacy Center.
But that would have been more costly and after five years of often bitter litigation, Wilde said. “We decided it was enough,” she said.
Argetsinger, who has a degenerative bone disease, said she was stunned to learn that the new theater she tried to attend in 1998 restricted wheelchairs to the front rows.
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