Movie theaters across the country are hiring extra off-duty police officers and security guards in the wake of the killing of 12 people Friday in a theater in Aurora.

It's a logical and maybe reassuring step, but it is unclear whether guards will remain part of the routine after news coverage of the killings fades.

Two things are clear, security experts say: One, movie theaters should be made more secure, permanently. And two, theaters may not be able to afford it.

"If not for popcorn, they would all be out of business," said Howard Levinson, a security consultant in Massachusetts who has worked extensively with movie theaters. "They make all of their money from concessions, and it's not the lucrative business it was before. It would be almost economically impossible to have a higher security standard. Without the general public paying as much as 50 percent more for a ticket, I don't see how a theater could stay open."

Would moviegoers pay another $5, in the age of Netflix and Hulu Plus? It's a question that theater owners would rather not test.

Even if security at theaters was upped drastically, Levinson said it probably wouldn't stop someone such as the perpetrator of Friday's mass shootings. James Eagan Holmes, a 24-year-old graduate-school dropout, is being held by Aurora police in the shootings.

Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said in a Friday news conference that there were no on-duty cops providing security for the midnight show.

But other details have not been released, so it's not yet known whether theater security guards were on duty, whether an employee was in the projection booth when the shootings began, or whether any alarms sounded when a man propped open an exit door, stepped outside, put on protective armor, returned to the theater and began firing.

Levinson said the extra security, the employee in the projection booth and the alarm should have been in place.

The midnight premiere of "The Dark Knight Rises" was a packed, pop-culture spectacle, not a sleepy Sunday matinee. Enhanced security should have been part of the event, Levinson said.

"When a movie premieres, a studio gives a stipend for additional security," Levinson said.

A call to Cinemark, the Texas company that owns the Century Aurora 16 theater, was not returned by press time.

And if a projectionist wasn't watching over the audience, that too was a mistake, Levinson said.

Some theaters have alarms attached to doors in the theaters; the alarms don't ring through the theater but instead alert employees that a door has been opened. In the past, the alarms were used primarily to thwart people from letting in friends without paying.

Tommy Burns, a security and police consultant in Nevada, said it is important to remember that movie theaters have been remarkably safe places, given the volume of people packed into them, the pre-movie drinking and the violence on the screens.

"You rarely have an incident. So as a theater operator, you have a concern for safety, but where do you draw the line?" Burns asked. Prior to Friday, he said, "nobody really saw the need" to swaddle movie theaters in security.

In the short term, armed police officers will be much more common at theaters, Burns said. But eventually they will vanish as closed-circuit televisions and security guards become the norm, he said.

However security manifests in movie theaters, for now it will be a big topic of discussion among theater owners.

"Where do you balance profitability with responsibility? That's what it is — balance," said Philip Jan Rothstein, the president of Rothstein Associates, a crisis-management consultancy in Connecticut. "Do you have a security guard, a camera, an alarm at every exit? Do you have a surveillance system? What kinds of controls are justifiable? What controls are realistic?

"It's a trade-off between privacy and comfort."

Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395, or

Kelsey Fowler contributed to this report.