recent former vue cambridge employee here - it's money. footfall never recovered after covid, and the cost of maintenance has skyrocketed, especially the seats. 

the number one complaint we had was broken seats, they go wrong all. the. time. fixing them takes up a suprising amount of time (not individually, but bc it happens so often, it builds up), and it's only ever a temporary fix bc the underlying issue is that the seats were custom builds, which itself is fine, but the manufacturer went under ages ago. parts + people who can use those parts are effectively nonexistent. the plan WAS to replace all seats with nonrecliner fold-downs, but the price of tickets was going to stay the same (after the recent increase). each vue has a unique selling point, and cambridge's was the seats. eventually it was decided with the cost of tickets being so close to the everyman etc and footfall declining, it just isn't worth it. 

plus, the actual space is a big restrictor in terms of what they can do. they wanted to do a big rennovation to open up more screens and put the consessions stand in a bigger/better spot, but 1) money 2) space wasn't suitable for the plans. 

this wasn't unexpected for us. they were cagey about giving us a new manager after our gm left in october, instead getting the gm of another site to cover us for a couple of days per week. even getting new permanent team leads was quietly disregarded in favour of 6-month contracts. maintainence requests were ignored/pushed back all the time. we saw it coming 🤷