Multiplex (movie theater)
A multiplex is a movie theater complex with multiple screens or auditoriums within a single complex. They are usually housed in a specially designed building. Sometimes, an existing venue undergoes a renovation where the existing auditoriums are split into smaller ones, or more auditoriums are added in an extension or expansion of the building. The largest of these complexes can sit thousands of people and are sometimes referred to as a megaplex.
The difference between a multiplex and a megaplex is related to the number of screens, but the dividing line is not well-defined. Some say that 16 screens and stadium seating make a megaplex, while others say that at least 24 screens are required. Megaplex theaters may have stadium seating or normal seating, and may have other amenities often not found at smaller movie theaters; multiplex theaters often feature regular seating.
The Kinepolis-Madrid megaplex in Spain, owned by the Belgian Kinepolis Group, is the largest movie theater in the world, with 25 screens and a seating capacity of 9,200, including one 996-seat auditorium.
History
Origins
The question of who was the inventor of the multiplex is "one of the longest-running debates in movie theater history." In a 2004 book, Ross Melnick and Andreas Fuchs identified five leading candidates: James Edwards, Sumner Redstone, Stanley Durwood, Charles Porter, and Nat Taylor.In 1915, exhibitor Charles Porter opened the Duplex Theatre in Detroit, Michigan, the first known instance of a dual-auditorium movie theater. It had twin 750-seat auditoriums in a single building, sharing a common box office and entrance. The Duplex Theatre's history is poorly documented and it is unknown why Porter built his theater that way, though it was apparently a bit too advanced for its time. It closed in 1922 and was remodeled into a ballroom.
In about 1915 two adjacent theatres in Moncton, New Brunswick, under the same ownership were converted to share a single entrance on Main Street. After patrons entered the door, there were separate ticket booths for each theatre, and different programs were shown. The arrangement was so unusual that it was featured by Robert Ripley in his Believe It or Not! comic strip. Before multiplexes, some cinemas did show different films at the same time in one auditorium, such as in Cairo, Egypt, reported in 1926.
In 1930, the Regal Twins in Manchester, England became the world's first multiplex followed by Studio 1 and 2 in Oxford Street in London in 1936.
In 1937 James Edwards twinned his Alhambra Theater in the Los Angeles area by converting an adjacent storefront into a second "annex" screen. While both screens would show the same feature movie, one would also offer a double bill. It did not convert to showing different movies on both screens until some time after Nat Taylor. On February 25, 1940, the Patricia Theater in Aiken, South Carolina made news by becoming what is believed to be the first two-screen theater in the United States showing different movies when operator H. Bert Ram added a screen to an adjoining building and shared a common box office. The main screen remained the Patricia Theatre and the Patricia Annex became known as the Little Patricia.
In December 1947 Nat Taylor, the operator of the Elgin Theatre in Ottawa, Canada, opened a smaller second theater next door to his first theater. It was not until 1957, however, that Taylor decided to run different movies in each theater, when he became annoyed at having to replace films that were still making money with new releases. Taylor opened dual-screen theaters in 1962 in Place Ville Marie in Montreal, Quebec, and at Yorkdale Plaza in Toronto, Ontario, in 1964.
Also in late 1947, but in Havana, Cuba, the Duplex movie theater was built to share the vestibule and ancillary facilities with the previously existing Rex Cinema ; they were both designed by the same architect, Luis Bonich. The programming was coordinated, so that one of them showed documentary and news reels. while the other was showing feature films. They were in use at least until the 1990s.
In 1963 AMC Theatres opened the two-screen Parkway Twin at the Ward Parkway Shopping Center in Kansas City, a concept which company president Stanley Durwood later claimed to have come up with in 1962, realizing he could double the revenue of a single theater "by adding a second screen and still operate with the same size staff". Edward Jay Epstein has credited Durwood with creating the multiplex in 1963. Also, the shopping center structure where the Parkway was located could not support a large theater, so two small theaters were built to avoid that issue, and at first both theaters played the same film.
In 1965, the first triplex was opened in Burnaby, Canada by Taylor Twentieth Century Theaters. AMC followed up on the Parkway Twin with a four-screen theater in Kansas City, the Metro Plaza, in 1966 and a six-screen theater in 1969. Durwood's insight was that one box office and one concession stand could easily serve two attached auditoriums. AMC was a pioneer in automating its projection systems, meaning that a single non-union projectionist could run all the movie projectors at a multiplex. Another AMC innovation was to offset the starting times of films, so that staff members who previously had downtime while films were playing at a single-auditorium theater would now be kept continuously busy servicing other auditoriums. Over the next two decades, AMC Theatres under Durwood's leadership continued to innovate as it built one multiplex after another with more screens across the United States, though its early multiplexes from the 1960s and 1970s are now regarded as relatively small by 21st century standards. According to Melnick and Fuchs, although Durwood was technically not the first person to build a multi-auditorium movie theater, he was "the man perhaps most responsible for driving the industry into 'splitsville'".
In 1965 Martin's Westgate Cinemas became one of the first indoor two-screen theaters in Atlanta, Georgia. Located in East Point, Georgia, it was later converted into a three-screen venue after a fire partially destroyed one of the theaters. The Disney family film Those Calloways had its world premiere at the Westgate, the only film to have been so honored at that theater.
In 1973, Sumner Redstone, as the head of National Amusements, was the first film exhibitor to trademark and regularly use the term "multiplex."
Megaplex
Opening in April 1979, the 18-screen Cineplex, co-founded by Nat Taylor in Toronto's Eaton Centre, became the world's largest multitheatre complex under one roof. It was expanded to 21 screens by at least 1981.In November 1988, Kinepolis Brussels, was opened by Kinepolis, the Belgian chain, with 25 screens and 7,600 seats, and is often credited as being the first "megaplex".
Meanwhile, during the 1980s, an elderly Durwood, in the "twilight of his prolific career at AMC", began a transition from his traditional pattern of squeezing "as many screens as possible... into small multiplexes" to building megaplexes which were truly gigantic in scale: a "new supersized movie house for a supersized nation". This coincided with the development of modern big-box stores and warehouse clubs in the United States, and in retrospect can be seen as part of a larger national movement to "grow retail spaces ever bigger."
On December 13, 1996, AMC Ontario Mills 30, a 30-screen theater, opened in Ontario, California, and became the theater with the most screens in the world. This was eventually tied by other AMC 30-screen theaters.
Venue sizes and demand
During the 1980s and 1990s, AMC Theatres was at the forefront of a massive boom in multiplex and megaplex construction across the United States. From 1988 to 2000, the number of screens in the United States exploded from roughly 23,000 to 37,000. By the end of 1997, the United States was home to 149 megaplexes with over 2,800 screens.The newer venues, especially the megaplexes, often wiped out smaller theaters and led to market consolidation. Aging single-screen movie palaces in congested downtown areas simply could not compete against the new suburban megaplexes with their profusion of convenient choices, gigantic screens, stadium seating, armrest cup holders, video arcades, spacious parking lots, and state-of-the-art projection and surround sound technology. In some areas, "megaplexes became not just another option for moviegoers, but soon the only one, having driven all other theaters out of business". From 1995 to 2004, the total number of theaters in the United States fell from 7,151 to 5,629.
One contributor to the wild explosion in the number of screens was the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The new law imposed expensive wheelchair ramp requirements for all new or renovated movie theaters with more than 299 seats. Such ramps took up as much as one-third of the space occupied by a theater, meaning all that space was no longer available for revenue-generating seats. AMC and its competitors discovered that it was more cost-effective to divide a multiplex into a large number of smaller auditoriums which each had 299 seats or less, than to build several big auditoriums which all required ramps. To fill all those seats, multiplexes began to book the same films across multiple screens with showtimes at every hour or half-hour.
Multiplexes and megaplexes supposedly have two major advantages over traditional single-screen movie theaters: they can share common infrastructure and staff across multiple auditoriums, and variations in auditorium size enable them to better match capacity to demand. However, movie theater operators eventually discovered the problem with stadium-size movie theaters is that they share the same flawed business model as stadiums: high fixed operating costs, combined with the fact that very few films in any given year can actually fill all those seats.
Average occupancy is around 10-15%—meaning that the majority of films are being shown to empty seats. Nearly all major U.S. movie theater companies ultimately went bankrupt as a result of this hasty development process. Among the few that were able to avoid bankruptcy were AMC Theatres and Cinemark Theatres.
The boom in new screens in the U.S. in the late 1990s and early 2000s led to multiple changes to Hollywood's distribution model. During the 1990s, American film studios experimented with distributing quirky indie films and art films to megaplexes which would have had a much harder time finding a broad theatrical audience in earlier eras, such as the 1999 hit Being John Malkovich. However, after the turn of the 21st century, as multiplex and megaplex owners came to realize they could screen large-budget blockbuster films all day by staggering showtimes across multiple screens, movie studios jumped onto the blockbuster bandwagon and shifted their film slates towards blockbuster films based on existing media franchises.