Everyman put Farah Golant in charge as interim chief executive after Alex Scrimgeour resigned with immediate effect at the end of December, handing the cinema chain a new leader just days after a profit warning. Golant, who joined the board in September, immediately froze the expansion programme and made paying down £21.6m of debt her first priority.

The move matters now because Everyman is no longer trying to prove it can grow fast. It is trying to prove it can stop losing money. The company has 49 sites, has not made a pre-tax profit since 2019 and has run up more than £56m in pre-tax losses over the last six years, a record that leaves little room for another disappointing year.

Golant’s first signals were enough to move the market. Everyman’s share price was up 24% to 36p since the start of the year after her appointment and the shift away from expansion, suggesting investors welcomed a harder edge after months of strain. She said in April that the coming year would be about “resetting to drive growth”, but the reset begins with restraint.

That is also where the company’s biggest problem sits. Everyman built its name by growing from a single venue in Hampstead, London, into a national chain, and for a time that success defined the brand. But expansion also left behind sites that were underperforming, while more than £6m in impairment charges over the last three years points to locations that did not live up to the promise of the model. The growth story helped mask the losses until the numbers became too heavy to ignore.

Analysts have said the chain lost some of its edge as premium cinema became a crowded market. David Hancock said Everyman once set the bar and then became the target, with rivals including Odeon and Vue moving into premium concepts of their own. That competition has only sharpened the pressure on Golant, who now has to show that freezing new openings and tackling debt can do more than buy time.

What she has not yet set out is the full turnaround plan. Investors now know the direction: fewer openings, lower debt and a push to repair the business from the inside. Whether that is enough to restore profits after years of losses will define Golant’s first months in the job.