Sample Book Chapters
Chapter 8 - Exhibition (Theaters)
Chapter extracts in this section of the website amount to 4,000 words distilled from 110,000 words in the print book.
The cinema business continues to hold its place in the movie-distribution cycle, despite encroachment by DVDs, pay-per-view television in its numerous forms, subscription pay television, and film pirates. No other movie platform captures the collective experience of a group huddled in a darkened auditorium sharing the laughs, the tears, and the wide-screen spectacle of cinema.
The United States and Canada have very active moviegoers by world standards. In the United States, each person averaged 4.7 movie-theater admissions in 2007. The comparable per capita figure for Canada is only slightly lower. In comparison, Europe musters just 2.3 per capita movie attendance. In much of Asia Pacific and Latin America, the per capita figures are even lower.
Those moviegoers fill theaters and drive up boxoffice. For the Friday-through-Sunday period of July 18–20, 2008, the Warner Bros. blockbuster The Dark Knight appeared on 9,400 screens, an all-time high 4,366 theaters (or playdates), on its way to another record of $158.4 million in box office for a three-day weekend. That screen count surpassed the 4,362 theaters for the 2007 Disney release Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Also premiering the same weekend as The Dark Knight were Universal’s musical Mamma Mia! on more than 3,700 screens with 2,976 theaters, and Fox’s animated kids’ film Space Chimps, which orbited on about 2,600 screens at 2,511 theaters.
The movie-theater business is coming off hard times. In the 1999 to 2001 time frame, thirteen sizable U.S. theater chains landed in bankruptcy, a casualty of audience demand for state-of-the-art facilities and overexpansion of theater circuits. Out of the rubble of bankruptcy, theater circuits merged in a consolidation trend. “Currently, the top one-third of screen probably account for 75% of all theater grosses,” estimates Hal Vogel in the seventh edition of Entertainment Industry Economics. “As of 1982, the top-grossing third of screens generated half of box office.”
Text copyright © 2009, Robert Marich. All rights reserved.
Used here with permission from SIU Press.
Table 8.3. Top exhibitors in North America by screens, 2007
Rank/Exhibitor/Country/Screens
1 Regal Entertainment1 U.S. 6,415
2 AMC Entertainment U.S. 4,431
3 Cinemark Cinemas U.S. 3,593
4 Carmike Cinemas U.S. 2,475
5 Cineplex Galaxy Canada 1,319
6 National Amusements U.S. 1,092
7 Century Theatres (acquired by Cinemark) U.S. 994
8 Kerasotes Theatres U.S. 602
9 Wallace Theatre Group U.S. 524