Five years removed from some of the darkest days the movie theatre business has experienced, the industry conversation has changed considerably. According to Cinema United’s newly released Fall 2026 Cinema Investment Report, North American exhibitors have spent USD $2.7 billion on capital improvements over the past two years, including USD $1.2 billion during the most recent year. The eight largest exhibitors accounted for USD $1.8 billion of the two-year total and USD $840 million during the past year. 

The obvious takeaway is that exhibitors are investing in their theatres. They clearly are. The more interesting question is what kind of exhibition industry all that money is building.

More Than a Fresh Coat of Paint
Cinema United’s report also serves as a counterpoint to a stubborn narrative that movie theatres are somehow standing still while the rest of the entertainment business moves on around them. As a trade organization representing exhibitors, making the case for continued investment in moviegoing is part of its job.

The report is not a comprehensive audit of every cinema in North America, nor does it pretend to be. Cinema United itself says the document showcases “just a few” examples of the investments being made across the industry. Conducting a detailed survey of the physical condition and capital spending of every member company would likely require an entirely different research exercise… and presumably quite a bit more time and money. 

There are certainly theatres across North America where it can appear the last meaningful capital improvement arrived sometime around 2002. Maybe even earlier. But that doesn’t negate the billions being spent elsewhere. If anything, it helps explain why continued investment matters.

More importantly, the money isn’t simply going toward replacing worn carpet and applying a fresh coat of paint.

Cinema United estimates that installing a new digital projector in a single auditorium carries a median cost of USD $88,000. A new sound system runs about USD $58,000. Installing 1,000 seats across multiple auditoriums can cost roughly USD $1.1 million, while adding a kitchen costs around USD $450,000 and a full-service lobby bar about USD $575,000. Reopening and completely transforming a closed cinema can reach USD $8 million. Building a new cinema entertainment center from the ground up? About USD $45 million. (Just ask the folks at B&B Theatres.)

Suddenly USD $2.7 billion starts looking less like an abstract corporate expenditure and more like a very large collection of projectors, seats, screens, kitchens, bars, auditoriums and construction costs.

Follow the Money
Perhaps more revealing than the amount being spent is where exhibitors are choosing to spend it.

During the first half of 2026 alone, Cinemark added 21 premium large format auditoriums — seven XD, 12 ScreenX and two IMAX — along with 112 D-BOX motion-seat auditoriums. The circuit says 72% of its auditoriums now feature recliners, while 60% of its locations serve alcohol.

Arizona-based Harkins Theatres says it invested more than USD $30 million during the past year, adding 13 CINÉXL premium auditoriums and four CINÉBAR locations while continuing a major remodel of its Norterra location in Phoenix, including Arizona’s first Lumma 4D E-Motion auditorium. 

Epic Theatres renovated its Deltona, Florida flagship with recliners, expanded food and beverage, a bar, arcade and a Lumma 4D E-Motion system. Megaplex’s Downtown Daybreak location combines premium auditoriums with bowling, lane-side dining, games and private event space. 

There are smaller-scale examples as well. CineLux renovated its Tennant Station location in Northern California with a reimagined lobby, digital marquee and luxury recliners across 11 auditoriums. Classic Cinemas, which remarkably seems to always be upgrading at least one of their locations, recently completed what it describes as a decade-long capital expenditure initiative across its circuit. 

All this spending suggests that cinema operators increasingly see their competitive advantage not simply as having a movie on a big screen, but, as that hackneyed mandate goes, in providing an experience that is demonstrably different from watching that same movie at home. Yes, that means premium formats. Better projection and sound. Recliners. Improved food and beverage. Motion seating. Social spaces. In some cases, bowling, arcades and other entertainment options that turn the cinema into something closer to a broader entertainment destination.

In case anyone was wondering, this is the kind of investment studios love, and apparently they’d like more of it.

When Disney’s Head of Global Theatrical Distribution Andrew Cripps appeared at a June industry discussion marking the renovation of Regal’s Sherman Oaks Galleria in Los Angeles, the panel generally agreed that cinemas remain under-screened when it comes to premium large format auditoriums.

Cripps explained the distributor’s interest rather plainly: when a studio spends hundreds of millions of dollars producing and marketing a film, it wants those first moviegoers seeing it in the best possible environment. Those customers then become some of the film’s earliest advocates. “You want as many premium screens as possible,” he said.

The contrast with just a few years ago is hard to miss. In 2021, studios were still experimenting with shortened windows, day-and-date releases and, in some cases, sending films directly to streaming.

Now one of Hollywood’s largest distributors is saying there aren’t enough premium screens. For movie theatre owners, that is a considerably better problem to have.

About That USD $1.2 Billion
There is an interesting wrinkle in Cinema United’s numbers. If exhibitors spent USD $2.7 billion over two years and USD $1.2 billion during the most recent year, simple arithmetic puts spending during the preceding year at roughly USD $1.5 billion.

In other words, annual capital spending declined. Now, that sounds more ominous than it necessarily is. After all, capital spending is inherently… well, lumpy, for lack of a better word.

A circuit that spends several million dollars converting a theatre to laser projection, recliners and premium auditoriums in one year doesn’t need to spend those same millions upgrading the same location again twelve months later. The equipment is installed. The seats are there. The work has been done. Ideally, capital can move on to the next location or be used for other purposes.

Some of the equipment being displaced can move on as well. Projectors, servers and other cinema hardware don’t necessarily reach the end of their useful lives simply because one exhibitor has upgraded. Refurbished equipment can find a second life with smaller operators, meaning one cinema’s capital investment can sometimes put better technology within reach of another at a lower cost than buying new.

So while the decline from approximately USD $1.5 billion to USD $1.2 billion is worth noting, it would be difficult to draw much of a conclusion from that movement without knowing the timing of individual renovation programs. Annual expenditures can decline even while the number of upgraded cinemas continues to grow.

Nor is all of the spending coming from the largest chains. Roughly USD $900 million of the USD $2.7 billion spent over the two-year period came from exhibitors outside the eight largest circuits. During the latest year, that figure was approximately USD $360 million.

In an industry whose investment story can sometimes sound as though it begins and ends with AMC, Cinemark and Regal, that’s kind of refreshing to hear.

There is another way to appreciate the scale of the spending. Cinema United puts the 2025 North American box office at approximately USD $9 billion. On that basis, USD $1.2 billion in annual capital investment is equivalent to roughly 13% of an entire year’s theatrical box office.

That is not the same thing as saying exhibitors are spending 13% of their revenue, much less their profits. Theatre operators keep only a portion of ticket grosses and, naturally, generate substantial revenue from concessions, advertising and other sources. But the comparison is useful if you’re looking for a measure of scale.

Put another way, the industry has gone from a business that emerged from the pandemic wondering how much of its physical infrastructure it could afford to preserve to spending an amount equivalent to more than one-tenth of annual box office on improving that infrastructure.

The Job Isn’t Finished
None of this means every moviegoer walking into a cinema this weekend will encounter laser projection, a premium auditorium, a freshly renovated lobby and a bartender waiting to make them a martini (I take mine stirred, not shaken, no matter what James Bond says).

They won’t. The experience remains highly uneven, sometimes even within the same chain or market. Cinema United’s featured locations are illustrative examples, not a statistically representative sample of the average North American cinema.

The report also stretches beyond North America for some of its case studies, spotlighting investments by Major Cineplex in Thailand and HOYTS in Australia, even though the headline USD $2.7 billion capital expenditure figure applies specifically to North American exhibitors. 

But that distinction doesn’t obscure what the report does demonstrate.

And those expenditures are beginning to reveal what exhibitors believe the future of moviegoing looks like: fewer generic auditoriums, more premium experiences; better projection and sound; more comfortable seating; broader food and beverage offerings; and, increasingly, venues designed to offer customers more than the movie itself.

The more interesting question is how quickly that investment can move through enough of the cinema estate that upgraded moviegoing stops feeling like something customers have to seek out and starts becoming what they simply expect when they go to the movies.

The post Cinema Owners Have Invested $2.7 Billion in Theatres. What Is That Money Buying? appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

But the most interesting question raised in Venice was what happens when the creator is not positioned downstream from the movie at all.

Rome-based Slim Dogs is an obvious test case. Founded in the online-video world, the company has expanded across branded content, documentaries and conventional audiovisual production. Co-founder Marco Cioni described that evolution less as abandoning digital media for traditional production than as the disappearance of the boundary between the two.

“For us, television is not a destination,” he said. “It is a parallel track that we can activate and that, actually, we want to contaminate with what we do elsewhere.”

That is a materially different model from the familiar story of the YouTuber attempting to “graduate” into television.

Slim Dogs director and co-founder Matteo Bruno described the audience instinct inherited from digital production as something closer to a creative principle.

“We have to reach people,” he said. “And if we don’t reach them, then we are getting something wrong.”

That remained true even while producing a documentary around a specialized subject such as Formula 1 history. “If I’m telling my personal story, or the story of a Formula 1 team that revolutionized that world in the 1980s and 1990s, I have to find a way to make it reach a 20-year-old and a 40-year-old,” Bruno said. “How do you do that? By telling a story that works and can reach people.”

The implication is significant for conventional producers. Digital-native companies have spent years operating in an environment in which audience response is immediate, measurable and unforgiving. Accessibility is not something handed to a marketing department when production is finished; it can be embedded into the storytelling itself.

Anna Manzo, head of The Jackal Management at CiaoPeople, was explicit about the danger of treating the people who developed those skills merely as promotional inventory.

“A creator is not just their follower count,” she said.

“Creators are already inside cinema,” Manzo continued. The more useful question, in her view, is “how we can enhance and recognize the skills that are behind them.”

The industry still frequently encounters creators through promotional campaigns attached to finished movies. “It is certainly a system that can work to bring people into theaters,” she said, but “it is not the only way.”

Manzo urged producers, platforms and institutions to look behind the visible personality and recognize “the competence behind that face and behind that content,” including production ability and expertise in developing formats and languages specific to particular platforms.

Her broader argument was that cinema should stop constructing creators as a separate category that occasionally enters its territory.“Every year there are these big articles about influencers arriving in Venice,” she said. “No. That’s not it.”

Instead, she argued, creators and established audiovisual companies should increasingly be understood as operating inside “a single ecosystem, without creating another territory.”

That philosophy was also visible in Good Morning Venezia, an initiative discussed during the panel in which creators covered the festival and particularly its Orizzonti section through digital formats.

“This isn’t about bringing creators into Venice,” Manzo said. “Creators are already here.”

The point, she continued, was to officially provide space within the festival where creators could use “their language, their positioning and their voice” alongside producers and publishers to “open new doors of access to cinema,” including films audiences might otherwise never encounter.

Antonio James Mascoli, whose work combines social content with direct access to professional film sets, offered perhaps the clearest description of what those doors could look like.

A creator’s role, he argued, does not have to stop at recommending the finished product. Creators can explain the machinery behind filmmaking and introduce audiences to crafts, workers and processes that conventional film marketing rarely foregrounds.

“We try not only to follow trends or understand what could potentially work,” Mascoli said. “We also try to create interests, to make people discover new things.”

That relationship depends heavily on trust. “I want to tell you a story,” he said. “If you follow me and you trust me, then let’s try to tell you something you might not expect, something you may never even have thought about approaching.”

For Mascoli, cooperation with the industry could ultimately allow creators to promote something broader than individual releases.

“We as creators could try to pursue that objective better — promoting not only films, but cinema as a whole, cinema as a machine — if we work together,” he said.

“We aren’t just people making videos in a little bedroom,” he added. “We are people who want to come here, go onto sets and work with all of you.”

Yet two less comfortable questions were largely absent from the Venice discussion.

The first concerns access. The growing embrace of creators has coincided with an increasingly tense relationship between studios, film journalists and professional critics, particularly when limited interview slots, junkets and early screenings are involved. Creators can produce sophisticated work that goes well beyond straightforward promotion and may occasionally overlap with criticism or journalistic practices, but they can also occupy a fundamentally different position in the publicity ecosystem: one in which access is granted specifically because their coverage can help sell a title to an audience.

That distinction can become problematic when promotional reach begins competing directly with independent editorial work for the same finite access.

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” provided a revealing recent example. Universal unusually opted against organizing the kind of separate early influencer screenings that have become commonplace around major studio titles, meaning professional film press largely drove the first wave of reactions. Creators were hardly excluded from the wider campaign, but the decision stood out precisely because critics and journalists have increasingly found themselves competing for access with personalities whose value to a campaign may lie primarily in promotional reach rather than independent evaluation.

This is not an argument for rebuilding an artificial wall between the two groups. A handful of creators produce truly compelling work, while a growing number of journalists increasingly operate across social platforms; neither category guarantees quality. But pretending there is no structural distinction between editorial independence and promotional partnership risks making the conversation about “one audiovisual ecosystem” rather too convenient for the companies controlling access.

The second unresolved issue is abundance. If practically anybody can become a creator, how does the industry distinguish genuinely distinctive talent from the enormous volume of accounts producing increasingly interchangeable material? Followers and views are the obvious shorthand, but neither necessarily measures audience trust, originality, storytelling ability or the capacity to sustain a project beyond short-form content. Even engagement figures provide only part of the answer.

There are now enormous numbers of creators covering the same trailers, festivals, releases and entertainment news through strikingly similar formats, editing rhythms, visual grammar and, at times, even delivery and tone of voice. The low barrier to entry that made the creator economy so powerful also produces tremendous amounts of duplication.

That creates a difficult selection problem for an industry increasingly eager to work with it. If cinema is serious about treating creators as writers, directors and producers, rather than simply marketing channels, it will eventually need more sophisticated criteria for identifying creative value than the size of an account.

Professionalization therefore requires more than providing creators with greater access. It also means determining what skills, standards and responsibilities should accompany that access — and being willing to distinguish between someone who has developed a genuine creative practice and someone who has simply learned to reproduce a successful content template.

None of that invalidates the argument made in Venice. It makes the next stage more difficult, and probably more interesting.

The creator economy’s contribution may ultimately have less to do with importing internet celebrities into an established film system than with importing a different relationship with audiences. But if that relationship is to become part of cinema’s infrastructure rather than merely another branch of its marketing apparatus, questions of access, editorial independence, quality and selection will have to be confronted alongside reach.

Creators tend to build the community before they build the project. Cinema has traditionally done the opposite. The opportunity is real, but so are the trade-offs.

The post Cinema’s Creator Problem Is No Longer Just About Marketing appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

For Wendt, one sign that international marketing has worked is surprisingly practical: whether local distributors actually use the materials. “The proof is if most of the distributors worldwide will use the campaign,” she said, rather than deciding to create their own artwork, trailers and social assets.

The experience also changed how TrustNordisk thinks about publicity. Wendt said the company had wanted to bring a publicist onto “The Last Viking” earlier, before its festival destination was known, but did not manage to do so. On subsequent titles, that role has moved further upstream, allowing teams to discuss sensitivities and positioning earlier.

That need for alignment was even more visible on Roubin’s “Le Faux Soir,” Michaël R. Roskam’s Belgian-French wartime drama produced by Frakas. Roubin divided its potential audience into Belgium, France and the rest of the world. Each required a different approach, yet distributors and sales agents were often focused on completed films while his team was trying to make decisions months earlier.

“The main problem actually that we faced is the time,” Roubin said.

Frakas eventually organized a dedicated marketing shoot with the cast and a professional team after principal photography. It was a workaround for something Roubin would rather have embedded into production itself: a marketing unit present during the shoot, when stills, interviews and promotional assets can be created without recreating the opportunity later.

Early, But Not Too Early
The paradox running through the panel was that everybody agreed marketing should begin earlier, yet “earlier” does not mean publishing everything sooner. At the time of Trevisan’s project, costs tied to the Eurimages support had to be reported within a relatively tight window, encouraging activity around the festival premiere even when theatrical releases remained months away.

Cadoux distilled the problem neatly: the work has to happen “early, but not too early.”

There is also the harder question of measurement. For a sales company, distributor uptake offers one indicator. For a public cultural fund, Cadoux cautioned, admissions and sales cannot be the only measures of success. The first projects entered the program in 2024, and meaningful circulation data can take years to emerge.

That makes the scheme less a quick experiment in boosting ticket sales than an attempt to change working habits. The practical recommendations from Venice were strikingly low-tech: bring sales agents and distributors in sooner, reserve development money for audience work even without a grant, and keep producers at the center of the discussion.

Roubin said the application process itself had changed his thinking. Even without winning support, forcing a producer to build a marketing plan early can be useful. “I will start on every project, even small projects, to think about marketing and audience at an early stage,” he said.

Trevisan pushed the idea further, arguing that “the conversation should begin with the director too.” Ask where a filmmaker imagines the premiere, she suggested, and “the answer can reveal whether the creative and industrial expectations are remotely aligned.”

Cadoux closed with an old marketing truth that sounded newly relevant after 45 minutes of talking about targeting, territories and timing: “It’s like people saying it’s a film for everyone. So it’s for no one.”

All in all, Eurimages’ experiment suggests that audience development can no longer be treated as the final stage of a film’s life. But starting early only works if the rest of the chain is willing to start early with you.

The post Film Marketing Needs to Start Earlier. Eurimages Is Learning How Hard That Can Be appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

The independent film sector is never short on conversations about audience development. What it lacks, judging by a closed working session at the 2026 Venice Production Bridge, is a reliable way to make those conversations happen early enough to change a film’s fate.

That tension ran through “New Paths to Audiences: Strengthening Collaboration Between Independent Film Distributors and Producers,” the fourth edition of Europa Distribution’s producers and distributors working session, held 6 September at the Hotel Excelsior’s Spazio Incontri. Organized in collaboration with ACE Producers, EAVE and the European Producers Club, the event brought together 30 distributors and 30 producers for three hours of small-group discussion followed by a plenary wrap-up.

Pascal Diot, head of the Venice Production Bridge, opened the session, while Europa Distribution project coordinator Valentina Serra introduced the association and its partner organizations. Before the room split into groups, Eurimages program manager and financial controller Thierry Hugot and project manager Iris Cadoux updated attendees on the Council of Europe fund’s Film Marketing & Audience Development Support Programme, which, crucially, is now rewarding marketing work that begins before principal photography. This set up the question that would dominate the afternoon: how much earlier can marketing, distribution and audience work realistically begin?

Ahead of the curve
The Eurimages figures suggest there is institutional appetite for trying. Across 2024 and 2025, the scheme received 72 applications and supported 30 films, a 45% selection rate, awarding EUR €1.47 million (USD $1.71 million) to projects led by producers from 23 countries. Seven supported titles were animations and four documentaries. Among the lessons Eurimages says it has drawn so far: early research pays off, digital can outperform traditional marketing, taste-based targeting can beat demographic targeting, centralized assets save money and the physical presence of talent matters.

For 2026, the program offers non-refundable grants of up to EUR €50,000 (USD $58,193) per film for activities ranging from audience research and digital campaigns to media assets, PR and outreach. Eligible projects must already have Eurimages co-production support, have a sales agent attached and not yet have reached their first market presentation or festival screening. The next deadline is 5 October. The 2026/27 assessment grid also explicitly rewards marketing work begun before principal photography, with five equally weighted criteria replacing the previous six-part system. The five 2026/27 criteria, each scored from 0–20, are: Strategy, Audience Targeting & Unique Selling Points; Transnational Dimension & Associated Promotional Material; Collaboration & Professional Capacity of the Parties Involved; Budget Coherence & Feasibility; and Timeliness & Implementation Readiness.

That notion of “early,” however, became considerably less straightforward once practitioners compared how films are actually financed, acquired and released.

Larry Bass of Ireland’s ShinAwil said one of the clearest missing links was not between producers and distributors but the absent third party. “Sales agents are missing in action everywhere,” he said. His group found that transparency between producers and distributors was often less of a problem than actual communication, particularly on international titles where a distributor may never meet the producer and instead deal exclusively with the sales company.

A second group, led by Jan Macola of the Czech Republic’s Pilot Film, exposed how different national systems can make any universal model difficult. Participants compared larger territories such as France, where pre-sales are common, with smaller markets where they are not. More importantly, Macola’s group returned to the same structural issue that Bass had laid out: “It’s very important to have dialogue from the early stage of development of the project,” while arguing that exhibitors, sales agents and funding bodies should also become part of that conversation.

Bass also identified practical areas where earlier collaboration could reduce duplicated costs. Posters and trailers were obvious examples. While participants disagreed on who should ultimately cut a trailer, Bass argued that trailer-making is “a specific skill base” and that sharing or coordinating such expenditure could improve recoupment for both sides.

He also stressed something increasingly decisive: cast access. “Cast is getting even more important for all parts of filmmaking,” he said, from financing through to getting a movie noticed. Therefore, availability needs to be built into the process rather than negotiated later.

Macola’s group also called for more money at the development stage, rather than concentrating resources on production and release. Better-funded development, they suggested, can allow producers to stop projects that are clearly going nowhere instead of being pushed to finish them “at any cost,” feeding an oversupply of films competing for already fragmented audience attention.

Cull my agent?
Igor Stankovic of Serbia’s Megacom Film offered the most combative take on sales agents. For domestic films, he said, early marketing collaboration is already possible: distributors can involve talent, visit locations and start digital communication during production. International acquisitions operate on another clock entirely. Some movies are pre-bought on the strength of a director or cast; others are only discovered once they emerge as festival titles.

“It is impossible to talk at that level [about] the early stage of the marketing strategy and campaigns,” Stankovic said of the latter category.

He argued that distributors need more direct access to talent and clearer information about release timing, particularly when a film’s international rollout may stretch across an 18-month window. Then came the session’s sharpest jab. On getting filmmakers and actors to support local releases and festivals, Stankovic suggested distributors might sometimes be better off approaching producers directly, quipping that sales agents “care just about the commission — and flying business class.”

Beneath the joke was a genuine frustration: local distributors can be expected to build campaigns around filmmakers and actors whom they may have little ability to access.

His group also questioned whether minimum guarantees are always the smartest place to concentrate distributor risk. Stankovic floated a model in which MGs could come down while contractual prints and advertising commitments become more explicit, giving producers reassurance that money will actually be spent on launching the film. “Maybe MG could be structured differently,” he said, with P&A becoming “an obligatory part of the contract.”

Simon Wullens of Lumière Benelux brought the discussion back to audiences. His group compared the film business with theater companies that employ dedicated audience developers whose job is to identify organizations and communities likely to connect with a work. “That might also be a good strategy for film distributors,” Wullens said.

His larger point was that distributors cannot solve audience problems at the end of the chain if the project never had a plausible audience to begin with. “Producers and distributors are actually forming a very good marriage,” he said. “Things go up, things go down, as long as we stay together.”

But that marriage requires early candor, including telling producers when a project appears destined to “fall between two chairs.” It also requires usable materials on time. Good stills, positioning materials and trailers are not decorative extras added once a movie is completed; they are the means through which distributors begin finding audiences.

Next, Stefan Bradea of Romania’s Bad Unicorn described a paradox that perhaps best summarized the afternoon, building on Stankovic’s comments. Distributors say they want to be involved early, and on national productions they often are, partly because local financing structures reward having a domestic distributor attached. Yet with international films, the same distributors want to minimize risk and may only commit once a project is substantially further along.

Finding the sweet spot
What they do want early, Bradea said, is influence over the marketing toolkit. Distributors “would like very much to be as soon as possible in the mix” when materials and strategy are being developed. He singled out set photography and trailers, arguing that having a trailer two or three months before the first international release would already represent an improvement.

Sales agents, in this formulation, are less villains than gatekeepers: the parties frequently controlling materials and marketing strategy, with local distributors sometimes brought in only after the campaign’s “sweet spot” has passed.

Bradea’s group also revisited financing. MGs remain critical to producers’ financing plans, so simply eliminating them is unrealistic. But rights structures, P&A guarantees and other deal terms could potentially reduce upfront MG exposure. He also raised contractual “callbacks” that can hold up releases until a film’s commercial potential has diminished, arguing for fewer such mechanisms and greater flexibility around secondary rights.

Later, Jakub Duszynski of Poland’s Gutek Film closed with the most philosophical report. His table began by imagining a “utopia” in which distributors could engage very early, discuss a project’s merits and perhaps invest. That vision immediately ran into resistance from producers worried about “too many cooks” and about protecting the filmmaker’s creative vision.

Duszynski’s group therefore reframed the proposition: if producers want distributors to share financial risk earlier, what exactly do distributors receive in return? Influence over development? Access and information? Or simply the expectation that they fall in love with the project as completely as the producer already has? This discussion was particularly important because it exposes the crucial tension of early distributor involvement: producers may want distributors to take financial risk earlier without necessarily wanting them to have greater influence over development. That’s a major contradiction that, as yet, is still in search of a meaningful resolution.

One idea floated was a database of first-time, lower-budget projects open to “courageous distributors” willing to read treatments and identify promising films before the normal acquisition stage. But the more telling complaint came from producers themselves. They do not simply want distributors to send back box-office figures and demographic metrics after release.

“They are very much disappointed with just getting numbers, statistics, metrics,” Duszynski said. “They would like to understand from distributors who are the audiences for their films.”

That may be the workshop’s clearest takeaway. The problem is not a shortage of data, schemes or marketing terminology. Every part of the chain still tends to make its biggest decisions at a different moment. Producers need financing before distributors feel safe. Distributors need materials before producers have finished making them. Sales agents sit between the two. Exhibitors enter later still. Meanwhile, the audience — the stake holder everyone claims to be working toward — is too often treated as something to locate once the film is already complete.

Eurimages is now explicitly putting money behind an attempt to reverse that sequence. The Venice discussion showed why doing so is difficult, but also why the status quo is increasingly untenable. Or, as Stankovic put it with considerably less diplomacy: without films, cinemas would be “just huge popcorn stores.”

The post Everyone Wants to Market Independent Films Earlier. So Why Doesn’t It Happen? appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta had a peculiar assignment on Monday: announce the settlement in his antitrust lawsuit that effectively clears the way for Paramount Skydance to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery while making clear that he still does not think the two companies should merge.

“This settlement is not a vote of support for this merger,” Bonta said at a September 21 press conference. His written statement was similarly careful, calling the agreement “the best course of action” rather than suddenly discovering virtues in combining two of Hollywood’s five remaining major film distributors.

Paramount CEO David Ellison sounded significantly less conflicted. In a memo to employees after both the states and Writers Guild of America settled their antitrust lawsuits, Ellison said Paramount now has “complete clearance for this merger” and expects the transaction to close in approximately two weeks.

Between those two statements lies one of the most consequential Hollywood antitrust settlements in decades.

This was a merger much of Hollywood did not want, involving a company whose last several decades have already been defined by difficult combinations, restructurings and breakups. Cinema operators did not get the merger stopped. More than 5,000 actors, directors, writers and other industry workers signing a public letter did not get the merger stopped. The Writers Guild did not get the merger stopped. Ultimately, a lawsuit brought by 12 state attorneys general did not get the merger stopped either.

What those efforts did produce was a set of protections intended to cushion some of the consequences — for a while.

And before getting to what movie theatres received, it is worth stating what Bonta did not get; There is no structural remedy that Paramount must undertake before it can acquire Warner Bros.

No studio is being spun off. No cable network must be sold. Warner Bros. Pictures and Paramount Pictures are not required to remain separately controlled competitors. The merger closes intact.

That is rather noteworthy for a case in which Bonta repeatedly argued that a structural competitive problem required structural remedies rather than promises about future corporate behavior. Instead, the structural remedies wound up becoming the punishment if Paramount violates the behavioral remedies Bonta once said were insufficient.

But we’ll come back to that.

This Time, They Put It in Writing
For theatrical exhibition, the settlement is considerably more substantial than the headline promise that Paramount-Warner will release “30 movies a year” suggests.

For cinema operators, the headline terms of the proposed five-year consent decree are unusually specific:

• 30 theatrical releases annually for years one and two, rising to 32 for years three through five
• At least 20 wide releases annually, rising to 21, with “wide” defined as 2,000 screens
• A 45-day exclusive theatrical window and 90-day SVOD holdback
• At least 20% of the slate must have production/acquisition budgets of at least $50 million and reach 3,000 screens
• Marketing support comparable to similar releases
• Three years of protection around existing film-rental terms
• Five years of continued access to the Paramount and Warner Bros. catalogues
• USD $30 million per-film consequences for output shortfalls, with Miramax divestiture after an uncured breach

Just as important are the anti-gaming provisions behind those headlines. A film released on fewer than 600 U.S. screens does not count unless it expands to 1,000 within 30 days. Re-releases, commemorative editions and repackaged versions of previously released intellectual property do not count at all. At least four films each year must qualify as Independent Films, though the definition is considerably looser than the label implies: any film based on an original screenplay qualifies, even if developed and financed entirely in-house. The word “independent” is doing some unusually heavy lifting. Separately, the decree creates a USD $5 million-a-year fund to acquire independent films. And at least half of the annual slate must be produced or jointly produced by the combined company — a qualification that becomes important later. The decree also calls its USD $50 million/3,000-screen titles “tentpoles,” a fairly modest budget threshold for what the industry usually means by that word.

For anyone who has spent the past decade listening to theatrical promises made during studio mergers, the important difference is obvious.

This time, somebody put them in writing. In an industry where assurances have become a depreciating asset, that is incredibly important, even if it does not make the underlying consolidation any easier to trust.

That matters given that movie theatre owners have been here before.

When Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, exhibitors repeatedly warned that combining two major suppliers of theatrical films would eventually mean fewer films and greater negotiating leverage for the surviving studio. The state attorneys general later cited what happened next: Disney and Fox averaged roughly 28 wide releases every single year before combining; from 2022 through 2025, the merged company released 54… in total.

The lesson exhibition carried forward from Disney-Fox was not simply that studios sometimes make optimistic promises before mergers. It was that those promises have limited value once the merger is complete and the negotiating leverage has changed.

Cinema United’s position earlier this summer was therefore remarkably specific. The trade association wanted a long-term commitment to theatrical output backed by meaningful exclusivity and marketing; protection against higher film-rental terms; safeguards ensuring theatres of all sizes could obtain films without programming restrictions that undermined local decision-making; and continued reasonable access to both studios’ libraries.

The state settlement meaningfully addresses three of those four demands, with perhaps the most consequential being film rental.

For the first three commitment years, Paramount-Warner must maintain rental terms consistent with the pre-merger “best practices” of Paramount and Warner Bros. for each exhibitor. The language includes honoring existing rental rates and terms and establishing a benchmark based on the terms each studio offered that same exhibitor before closing.

That is not a universal film rental freeze, and it does not mean a single-screen independent suddenly receives AMC’s economics under a most-favored-nation deal. What it does is anchor each exhibitor to its own pre-merger relationship with Paramount and Warner Bros. and attempts to prevent the combined company from immediately using its increased leverage to impose materially worse terms. The precise application of the decree’s “higher of the rental rate schedule” language will bear watching, even if the verbiage is convoluted.

For theatre owners who remember the rental changes that followed Disney-Fox, that is not a minor provision.

The decree also requires both Paramount and Warner Bros. film catalogues to remain available to exhibitors throughout the commitment period on terms broadly comparable to those offered during 2025, with limited exceptions around major reissues.

Cinema United President and CEO Michael O’Leary was broadly positive about the settlement, saying the agreement “accomplishes many of exhibition’s objectives.” He pointed to increased film production, theatrical exclusivity and wide distribution, protection against cost increases and continued access to both studios’ catalogues, while acknowledging that “no settlement can eliminate all risk from a merger of this size.”

Notably absent from O’Leary’s statement was Cinema United’s earlier demand for broad film access and programming autonomy for theatres of every size. The decree contains no comparably explicit prohibition on minimum-play requirements, clean-screen demands or other booking conditions that can be particularly burdensome for smaller operators. That omission matters beyond this deal: had such limits been written into a federal consent decree, they could have established a benchmark other distributors would have had a much harder time ignoring.

Thirty Movies Is Not Thirty Paramount-Warner Productions
There is another important distinction buried beneath the whole “30 movies” clause.

The decree requires Paramount-Warner to release 30 films in the first two years and 32 thereafter. It only requires half of them to be produced or jointly produced by the combined company.

Thirty movies sounds somewhat different once you read the verbs.

In the first two years, only 15 must be produced or co-produced by Paramount-Warner. In the final three years, the number is 16. A Legendary-style arrangement in which an outside company originates or substantially finances a project while Warner participates as co-producer and distributor can satisfy that requirement. The remaining films can be acquired for distribution.

That may be perfectly satisfactory to a theatre owner whose immediate concern is having attractive movies to put on screens. A ticket buyer does not particularly care which corporate balance sheet financed the negative cost.

But it matters enormously when analyzing what the merger does to Hollywood’s industrial structure. The decree guarantees a pipeline of movies. It does not guarantee the survival of the two independent studio pipelines that existed before the merger. Again, see Disney-Fox for how that turned out.

There is no requirement that Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures maintain separate greenlight processes, acquisition departments, distribution strategies or corporate priorities. One independent buyer of scripts, talent and projects still disappears when the companies combine. That means ParaBros or Warnermount or whatever the name of the new company is, may be trying to make more movies than they do today, with what will likely be fewer human resources.

The first two years’ 30-film floor is also less expansive than it might sound. Paramount itself said earlier this year that it planned 15 theatrical releases in 2026 and that Warner Bros. also had 15 on its calendar. In other words, the initial 30-film commitment largely makes the combined companies’ already-planned level of output enforceable rather than requiring an immediate increase above it. The meaningful additions are the definitions, release thresholds, windows, marketing requirements and enforcement provisions surrounding that number.

The Exhibitors Who “Flipped”
The settlement is already producing a convenient narrative in which theatrical exhibitors — particularly AMC, Regal and Cinemark — helped collapse the states’ case by switching sides.

There is some truth buried inside what is surely convenient shorthand. Bonta’s lawsuit alleged that the merger would harm theatres. When the three largest U.S. circuits individually reached accommodations with Paramount and publicly supported a negotiated path toward closing, the states were left arguing that exhibition needed protection while several of its largest companies were saying they had found a way forward.

That unquestionably complicated the litigation. But saying exhibitors simply “flipped” mistakes a negotiation for an ideological conversion. AMC, Regal and Cinemark appear to have reached the practical conclusion that Paramount would probably acquire Warner Bros. one way or another. They used the period in which Ellison badly needed industry support to negotiate commitments before the merger closed.

While AMC has the size and financial might to protect AMC, a regional circuit with 30 screens — much less an independent operator with one or two — cannot negotiate with Paramount from remotely the same position.

That imbalance is precisely why Cinema United’s August position mattered. The trade group did not endorse the merger. It said that if Bonta and Paramount were going to negotiate a resolution, any settlement needed protections covering output, windows, film rental, booking practices and catalogue access across the exhibition market.

As we previously detailed, Cinema United changed tactics. It did not suddenly announce that eliminating one of five major theatrical distributors was a wonderful idea. That nuance has been increasingly lost as the merger reaches the finish line.

The decisions by AMC, Regal and Cinemark unquestionably made Bonta’s case harder. It is difficult to argue that theatres need protection from a transaction their three largest operators have decided they can live with. But blaming exhibitors for the settlement confuses a loss of leverage with the decision to settle. Exhibitors did not settle the lawsuit. Twelve attorneys general did.

The Structural Remedy That Became a Penalty
Which brings us back to the biggest contradiction in the agreement.

Bonta spent weeks distinguishing between behavioral promises and structural remedies. On September 18, just days before settlement, Reuters reported that he continued to regard structural remedies as the most effective way to protect competition.

Yet, the final decree requires no structural change before Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Instead, the agreement contains two possible future divestitures.

If Paramount-Warner fails to hit the annual theatrical-release requirement, it gets six months to cure the shortfall. If it still fails, the combined company must divest its ownership interest in Miramax. Separately, Paramount owes USD $30 million for every missing film, whether or not the shortfall is subsequently cured. None of that money goes to exhibitors: 50% goes to union health and retirement trusts, 40% to the Motion Picture & Television Fund and 10% to the National Association of Attorneys General Fund. In other words, it is a deterrent, not a make-whole remedy for the theatre that did not get the movie.

Should Paramount eventually fail to release enough movies, the answer to excessive studio concentration is therefore, apparently, to sell Miramax. 

Sure, Miramax possesses a valuable library and recognizable intellectual property, of which Paramount owns a 49% stake. What it does not possess is anything resembling the scale, distribution infrastructure or current production output of Warner Bros. Pictures or Paramount Pictures. Selling it after a violation would be a structural action. But it would not recreate the major independent theatrical distributor eliminated by the merger.

The cable remedy, however, is more substantial. Paramount and Warner Bros. must negotiate basic-cable carriage separately for five years and cannot use their combined leverage to tie the two portfolios together. (Why the same kind of remedy wasn’t applied to theatrical distribution is a mystery.) An uncured violation can ultimately force the divestiture of BET — a network Paramount has shopped in recent years — along with VH1, Comedy Central and several other cable networks.

That would be a meaningful structural penalty. But again, it is a penalty for violating a behavioral remedy, not a structural remedy imposed on the merger itself.

Wall Street’s reaction was more mixed than a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Warner Bros. Discovery shares rose more than 10% Monday as closing risk receded, while Paramount fell nearly 3%. With many settlement terms already circulating before the announcement, the moves are better read as a repricing of certainty and deal costs than as an antitrust verdict on Bonta’s concessions.

Five Years Is Not A Long Time When It Comes to a Warner Bros. Merger
There is another fundamental mismatch in the settlement; The merger is permanent. Most of the protections are not.

The commitment period covers five full calendar years following closing. Worse, after only two full commitment years, Paramount-Warner may ask the court to modify the decree if it can demonstrate that the restrictions impair its ability to operate successfully or compete effectively and that the requested modification is not substantially likely to lessen competition. Paramount bears the burden of proving that case, so this is not an automatic two-year escape clause. It is nevertheless an explicit opportunity to seek relief from a settlement being sold publicly as a five-year commitment.

Five years is on the very low end of where this agreement should land. The Justice Department’s consent decree permitting Comcast to acquire NBCUniversal imposed behavioral conditions for seven years. The original Live Nation-Ticketmaster decree ran for ten. When DOJ later alleged that Live Nation had repeatedly violated that settlement, the decree was strengthened and extended another five-and-a-half years.

Indeed, a Justice Department antitrust official once described the central problem with temporary behavioral merger remedies using Comcast-NBCUniversal: when the decree expired, the merger remained. The department contrasted those temporary restrictions with structural relief intended to solve the competitive problem permanently.

That observation could have been made about the Paramount-Warner agreement. For an industry that greenlights films years before audiences see them, five years is not especially long. Ten would have covered something closer to multiple complete development and release cycles and provided a far longer test of how the combined company behaved once integration was complete.

Warner Bros., meanwhile, has spent much of the past quarter-century demonstrating that its mergers deserve a warranty longer than five years.

AOL and Time Warner combined in 2001, only for major pieces of that empire eventually to be spun back out. AT&T acquired Time Warner in 2018 and then, less than four years later, separated WarnerMedia and combined it with Discovery to create Warner Bros. Discovery in April 2022. Now Warner Bros. Discovery is preparing to disappear into Paramount Skydance.

The corporate structure keeps changing. The WB water tower, on the other hand, seems to have remarkable job security.

Enforceable — But By Whom?
Then there is the word “enforceable,” which has appeared repeatedly in descriptions of the settlement… and appropriately so.

This is not simply a David Ellison promise from a CinemaCon stage. The commitments sit inside a federal consent decree overseen by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Paramount must appoint an internal compliance monitor. An independent monitoring trustee, jointly selected by Paramount and a committee of the states, receives access to relevant personnel and records and reports on compliance. The CEO and general counsel must certify compliance annually.

That is somewhat meaningful since an antitrust decree does not enforce itself.

If Paramount disputes compliance, any of the plaintiff states can bring an enforcement proceeding in federal court. The decree requires notice and a meet-and-confer process before enforcement litigation, with non-binding mediation also available.

More importantly for exhibitors, theatre owners are not third-party beneficiaries of the decree. The agreement expressly says no outside person or entity may claim rights as a beneficiary under it. Meaning, if an exhibitor believes Paramount-Warner has violated the rental, catalogue, window or output commitments, the theatre cannot simply march into federal court and enforce the decree itself. It needs the states to care. And it needs them to continue caring three, four or five years from now, potentially under different attorneys general, after the merger has ceased to dominate Hollywood headlines.

The decree also includes a force-majeure provision covering events including wars, pandemics, strikes, labor disruptions, supply-chain failures and economic recessions. Paramount is excused only to the extent such an event actually prevents performance, and the states may ask the court to review an invocation of the provision. It is not the blank check some critics have suggested.

Bonta Ran Out of Room — Not Reasons
None of this means the states had an easy path to victory if they continued litigating. The exhibitors were only one part of a much broader squeeze. By September, Bonta’s room to maneuver had narrowed considerably.

California political figures had pressed for a resolution. Paramount was threatening a possible (if impractical) relocation of corporate operations. Federal regulators had already cleared the transaction. The Justice Department had even intervened in the recent bond dispute on Paramount’s side of the procedural question. And every additional delay increased Paramount’s financial exposure under the merger agreement.

At Monday’s press conference, Bonta did not pretend he had suddenly become enthusiastic about the transaction. He defended the settlement as the strongest practical result available while continuing to say he would have preferred the companies remain separate. That is worth taking seriously. Litigation has risk, and antitrust plaintiffs do not get to substitute certainty about their own theory for certainty about what a judge will ultimately decide. But that does not make the difference between Bonta’s original position and his final settlement disappear.

The states sued over what they characterized as a structural reduction in competition. They settled for temporary behavioral protections backed by monitoring, monetary consequences and structural penalties for future violations.

That is a legitimate settlement strategy. It is not the structural solution Bonta spent much of the summer saying was necessary. The decree is not insubstantial outside exhibition: it also requires at least USD $1.5 billion in incremental U.S. production spending over five years, with higher domestic-production thresholds if new federal and state tax credits are enacted, and creates a News Editorial Independence Board for CNN and CBS News. Both are meaningful commitments. Neither changes the merger’s structure. Bonta has said he intends to pursue tax-credit legislation that could trigger the higher production requirements.

What Exhibition Actually Won
Calling the settlement a victory for theatrical exhibition would probably be an overstatement, even if being considered of primary importance during a USD $110 billion merger was a nice change of pace.

Exhibitors did not ask for the number of major film distributors to fall from five to four. Cinema United spent months arguing that such concentration would increase studio bargaining power, threaten output and make smaller operators particularly vulnerable. The merger still does all of the structural things they worried about.

But in a deal they were increasingly unlikely to prevent, exhibitors did accomplish something they failed to secure during Disney-Fox: important protections were written into an enforceable court order rather than left in an executive’s talking points. The particulars are familiar by now, but the achievement is straightforward: output, release width, theatrical windows, catalogue access, film-rental terms and consequences for noncompliance are no longer merely negotiating promises; they are written into a federal consent decree. 

That will be important beyond Paramount-Warner.

The next time Hollywood decides that three major film distributors would be more efficient than four — because apparently this remains an evergreen corporate brainstorming exercise — Cinema United and individual exhibitors will not begin negotiations with a blank sheet of paper.

They can point to Paramount-Warner.

If one merged studio could accept minimum output, defined release widths, theatrical windows, catalogue access and film-rental protections, the next studio combination will have to explain why those provisions suddenly became impossible. That may prove to be one of the more durable results of this entire fight.

The battle also demonstrated something else. Disney-Fox moved through the regulatory process without anything approaching the sustained resistance Paramount-Warner encountered. This transaction required months of litigation, a federal no-close order, negotiations with major exhibitors, concessions to organized labor, thousands of entertainment-industry opponents, intervention by political leaders, settlement with 12 states and a 32-page federal consent decree.

Paramount got its merger. Nobody contemplating the next one can reasonably conclude that it was effortless. Whether that makes another combination less likely is impossible to know. It certainly increases the regulatory, financial and reputational cost that anyone considering such a move will have to price into the transaction.

For Hollywood stakeholders, the list of unambiguous winners is fairly short. David Zaslav stands to be handsomely rewarded for completing the transaction, while David Ellison gets the company he fought so hard to buy and avoids the enormous financial consequences of a failed deal. For theatrical exhibitors, the achievement is more defensive than triumphant: they did not make the merger desirable; they forced some of the risks exposed by Disney-Fox to be acknowledged and turned corporate promises into enforceable obligations.

Now comes the harder part. The protections have to survive integration, economic pressure, management changes, future litigation over their meaning and the simple passage of time. They exist for five commitment years, with Paramount permitted to seek modification after two.

Paramount and Warner Bros. will still be one company in year six. Most of the obligations intended to make that combination tolerable will not. That is when the industry will find out what this settlement was really worth

The post The Paramount-Warner Merger Is Permanent. The Guardrails for Movie Theatres Are Not appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

The Studios Bypassed Venice
Like Cannes 2026, the studios stayed away from Venice. In competition, only the Disney-owned Searchlight Pictures pitched up with “Wild Horse Nine”, although one imagines that director Martin McDonagh would’ve insisted on it, given his last two award-winning films, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and “The Banshees of Inisherin” also launched in Venice. Is this studio absence the shape of things to come? Or just a blip? Perhaps it was bad timing; films like Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook tale “The Social Reckoning”and David Fincher’s “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” were both expected to come but were reportedly undergoing reshoots in August, meaning a festival berth was impossible. But other films deliberately skipped the Lido, like Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Warner Bros. title “Digger,” starring Tom Cruise – a repeat of what the studio did last year with Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.” Does this mean Hollywood has really gone cold on using the major festivals as a launchpad?

In the past, Venice had a wonderful track record premiering films that went on to win the Best Picture Oscar (“Spotlight,” “Nomadland” and “The Shape of Water,” to name but three), however the Academy Award wins for “One Battle After Another” showed that a festival splash isn’t the only route to success. “The studios are in such a state of stalemate, struggling and redefining themselves by merging,” artistic director Alberto Barbera told Variety ahead of the festival. “Or in any case, experiencing an identity crisis, that auteur films usually destined for festivals just aren’t there.” Certainly, that’s a reasonable explanation. But between the rising costs to take a film to Venice — the eye-watering prices to stage a press junket in the Lido’s Excelsior Hotel will surely put some off — and the increasingly risk-averse studios concerned that a film might tank after poor reviews — must also be a contributing factor. Whatever the case, after this year’s Cannes and Venice, it will be interesting to see what happens in 2027, and whether the festivals will become primarily a platform for world cinema, which they always have been, of course, as Hollywood tries to figure out how best to market its product in the era of TikTok. 

Female Directors Were Back on the Agenda
Ahead of the festival, the main talking point was the fact that the main competition line up had just one female filmmaker; May el-Toukhy. Noting that 50% of the selection committee is female, Barbera told Deadline during the festival that they tried “very hard to find more films by women for the competition.” True or not, the Venice team could breathe a sigh of relief that the jury, headed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, was taken with el-Toukhy’s searing post-World War II drama “Woman Unknown.”  Not only did the film win the Golden Lion, making the Danish-Egyptian filmmaker just the eighth woman to claim the prize in the festival’s history, but it also won Best Actress for leading lady Mathilde Arcel. Quite brilliantly, she plays Marie, a nanny whose past threatens to destroy her at a time when women in Copenhagen were being exposed for fraternising with German soldiers.

The female quota in competition was also slightly nudged up by the late addition of the documentary “NAZA,” co-directed by Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, the duo behind the Oscar-winning “No Other Land.” But until more women are given the opportunity to direct, such fallow years will naturally draw attention. Outside of the main competition, there were some excellent female-driven works, including Chinese filmmaker Michelle Zhou’s same-sex relationship drama “Big Little Things,” which played in the Orizzonti (Horizons) sidebar. Laura Poitras, the last woman to win the Golden Lion for “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” was back with “They’re Here,” a haunting 25-minute movie, co-directed with Rachel Lauren Mueller, which depicts Minnesotan residents combatting the work of ICE in the United States. Gyllenhaal herself also presented “Flesh Impact,” an elegant short she made to celebrate Marilyn Monroe’s 100^th birthday, starring Dakota Johnson and Ellyn Burstyn as two very different versions of the screen icon. 

The Robert Pattinson Roadshow Continues
While it was harder than usual to spot the awards contenders in this muted Venice line-up, the battle for Best Actor this awards’ season heated up with John Malkovich claiming the Volpi Cup for his work as a world-weary CIA agent in “Wild Horse Nine.” Malkovich has been nominated for an Oscar twice before, and never won, suggesting a victory for him will be a popular vote. But can he do anything to stop Robert Pattinson? This feels like Pattinson’s year, following his headline appearance in “The Drama,” opposite Zendaya, and his role as the conniving Antinous in “The Odyssey.” With a turn in “Dune Part Three” still to come, in Venice, he took the lead as real-life TV presenter Chris Hansen in Lloyd Oppenheim’s A24-backed “Primetime.” Set all around the world of ‘To Catch a Predator’, the Dateline NBC news segment in the early 2000s that set up stings to ensnare internet paedophiles, it was another slick performance from the British actor, who turned 40 in May and could yet cap it with a first Oscar nomination — and maybe even statue — of his career. Certainly, he was willing to put every effort into promoting “Primetime,” arriving on the Lido over the weekend as he nipped away from the London shoot of Matt Reeves’ “The Batman: Part II.” At the A24 party to celebrate the film, he graciously greeted well-wishers desperate for selfies. This man knows how to work a crowd. 

Documentaries Were Out In Force
This year, the Venice Film Festival announced a new non-fiction strand, Films On Films, based on the wealth of documentaries they’d received as submissions. Featuring documentaries that explored cinema, among those that made the cut, Walter Fasano’s “Nino – A Film About Nino Rota,” a deep dive into the work of “The Godfather” composer; “Joie de vivre,” Luca Guadagnino’s 7hr 25min look at Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci; and Sophie Fiennes’ “The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias,” her third collaboration with philosopher and critic Slavoj Žižek. The Hollywood Reporter even titled one article: “Forget the Red Carpet — Venice’s Real Stars Are in the Documentaries This Year.”

Indeed, it was impossible to argue against the fact that the biggest stars at this year’s Venice were not movie actors, but musicians: Oasis’ Liam and Noel Gallagher hit the red carpet ahead of the world premiere of “Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger,” a moving look at the power of music that followed the famously fractious siblings on their 2025 reunion tour. If that was something of a surprise — never mind the grown men pictured crying on screen, there were plenty of nostalgia-inspired tears in the Sala Grande auditorium — it wasn’t the only documentary to move people. 

The aforementioned “NAZA,” which dug into the Israeli military tactics used in the hunt for Hamas operatives after the 7 October attacks, drew a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation when it played towards the end of the festival. Winning a Special Jury Prize, it felt like the first port of call for a film destined to run the distance in the awards season. Then there was “Musk,” a four-hour odyssey from Alex Gibney that burrowed into the life and largesse of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, tracing his time from Tesla Motors and SpaceX to the Twitter takeover and his controversial time heading up DOGE. A typically forthright work from Gibney (“The Armstrong Lie,” “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks”), it was another example of the healthy state of documentary film right now.

Japanese Cinema Continues its Renaissance
Whisper it quietly, but Japan is going through a rich period of filmmaking. After strong showings in Cannes 2025 as well as 2026, when it was the official Country of Honour, Japanese cinema was also in the spotlight at Venice. Among the selection, cult filmmakers Takeshi Miike (“Audition”) and Shinya Tsukamoto (“Tetsuo: The Iron Man”) were present with two very different movies. In competition, Tsukamoto’s “Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?” — just his second English-language production — told of the real-life Vietnam veteran Allen Nelson, played by Rodney Hicks. Hicks gave a blistering performance of a man who overcomes his PTSD. Miike, meanwhile, delivered his first documentary feature, “Shumei: The Living Legacy of Kabuki,” which explored the Japanese theatrical art form and in particular the 2022 succession ceremony of Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII Hakuen as he is named heir to the Kabuki dynasty. 

Also, in competition, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s gorgeous manga adaptation “Look Back” – marking his second film in three months, following “Sheep in the Box.” Speaking at the festival, Kore-eda said that while Japan is lagging behind Korea when it comes to making an impact in the international market, things are beginning to change. “Compared to somewhere like Korea, there has been almost no support from the government for film for decades, and then I think they’ve realized that because, as of last year, there is now some support for overseas film promotion… but I think that there’s a lot of work to do to make sure that this continues for another 20 years, so that we can see the next generation coming through as well.”

The post Venice 2026: Defiant Documentaries, Female Filmmakers and a Scaled-Back Studio Offering appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

At festivals, Nordic films travel extraordinarily well. They win prizes, attract sales agents, generate press and enter foreign markets carrying exactly the kind of cultural prestige independent distributors are supposed to monetize. The harder step comes afterward: converting that prestige into a reason for somebody to leave home and buy a cinema ticket.

That distinction matters because the European theatrical market has become increasingly unforgiving. More than 3,400 European films received commercial releases worldwide in 2024, yet only 47 passed one million admissions, 35% fewer than during the pre-pandemic period. In 2025, European cinema attendance then fell another 5.5%, from 843 million to 796 million admissions. More European films are circulating, but relatively few are achieving scale.

A Europa Distribution session at New Nordic Films during the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund on 27 August offered a close-up of that conversion problem through Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” and Hlynur Pálmason’s “The Love That Remains.” The wider question was how visibility turns into positioning, urgency and admissions.

Prestige Is Raw Material, Not a Business Model
For “Sentimental Value,” the advantages were considerable: Trier’s profile after “The Worst Person in the World,” a Cannes Grand Prix, awards momentum and a cast including Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård.

Yet even those assets did not make success automatic.

Bianca Maria Roiu of Bucharest-based arthouse distributor Bad Unicorn called the Romanian release “the perfect storm.” It drew more than 29,000 admissions over 16 weeks. Yet Bad Unicorn’s “Armand,” also starring Reinsve, had struggled, while Golden Bear winner “Dreams” still did not approach Trier’s numbers. Prestige and familiarity created favorable conditions; they did not produce a repeatable formula.

Taiwan offered the same warning from another angle. “For us, I would position Nordic films alongside other European films,” said Swallow Wings’ Albert Yao. In a market where arthouse competes with Hollywood, Japanese animation, Korean cinema and local releases, “Nordic” can signal quality without becoming a mass-market proposition.

That is the weakness in treating Nordic cinema as a bankable category. Quality recognition and consumer demand are not the same thing.

The Most Useful Festival May Not Be the Biggest
The international festival hierarchy can obscure another part of the equation.

Cannes, Berlin and Venice remain unmatched for global visibility, but for a Nordic debut or less immediately commercial auteur film, a festival outside the Big Three can sometimes provide a clearer market signal precisely because the film has more room to dominate the conversation.

Lilja Ingolfsdottir’s Norwegian debut “Loveable” is almost a textbook example. It world-premiered in Karlovy Vary’s main competition in 2024 and left with five awards, including the Special Jury Prize, Best Actress for Helga Guren and the Europa Cinemas Label. The latter matters particularly from an exhibition perspective: the film did not merely leave with critical validation, but with a recognizable theatrical selling point.

Karlovy Vary produced another striking Nordic example this year. Danish filmmaker Mads Mengel’s debut “The Guest,” sold internationally by LevelK, world-premiered in the Crystal Globe Competition and emerged with both the Special Jury Prize and Best Director. For first features such as “Loveable” and “The Guest,” becoming one of the discoveries of Karlovy Vary may therefore be more useful than simply possessing a laurel from a more crowded program elsewhere. Prizes, concentrated press attention and industry exposure give distributors and exhibitors a narrative they can actually sell.

Locarno has long performed a similar auteur-building function. Pálmason’s “Winter Brothers” world-premiered there in 2017, beginning the accumulation of recognition that would eventually make “a Hlynur Pálmason film” a meaningful proposition in itself.

More recently, Janicke Askevold’s Norwegian “Solomamma” entered Locarno’s 2025 competition with international sales already underway. The point is not that Locarno generated every deal, but that selection itself forms part of a film’s international positioning, giving buyers, distributors and press a platform around which momentum can accumulate.

Maria Bäck’s Danish-Swedish-Greek “Brave New Love” offered a fresh example this August. Sold by Reinvent Yellow and selected for Locarno’s International Competition, the film arrived with Anders Danielsen Lie, Kathrine Thorborg Johansen and an unruly story about marriage, motherhood, infidelity and desire. Its immediate Locarno value is easier to measure in attention than completed sales, but that distinction matters: festival impact begins with visibility and positioning, not when a box-office result appears.

Rotterdam makes the exhibition connection more explicit. Swedish-Finnish drama “Raptures” won IFFR’s 2025 Big Screen Award, which provides EUR €15,000 (USD $17,473) to the filmmaker and another EUR €15,000 to the Dutch distributor acquiring the film. Here the festival does not merely confer prestige; it directly incentivizes theatrical circulation.

The lesson is not that one festival tier has replaced another. It is that for independent cinema, fit can matter more than rank.

There is another striking pattern across these examples. “Loveable,” “The Guest,” “Brave New Love,” “Sentimental Value” and “The Love That Remains” all revolve, in different ways, around families under pressure. For all the talk of Nordic cinema as an exportable aesthetic, one of its most internationally legible recent strands may be remarkably domestic: universal emotional material filtered through a distinctive mixture of candor, discomfort and dry humor.

Distributors Are Increasingly Selling an Occasion
The Haugesund campaigns were most revealing when distributors described everything they had constructed around the films. Independent distributors are increasingly being asked not simply to advertise a movie, but to manufacture an occasion around it.

Swallow Wings turned “Sentimental Value” into a series of limited theatrical collectibles in Taiwan. In Romania, Bad Unicorn asked more than 200 guests at a press screening to bring objects carrying sentimental value. Roiu said the resulting images helped communicate that “this is a very intimate film and you can participate in this.”

Aerofilms pursued the same logic through Scandinavian food, design and a relationship-focused conversation game. For “The Love That Remains,” it went further with dog-friendly screenings, a therapist Q&A and Icelandic-themed collaborations, while Mozinet built its Hungarian campaign around slow living, nature and craftsmanship.

The common logic matters more than the individual stunts. These campaigns try to rebuild something streaming has weakened: urgency. A film that audiences assume they can watch later needs a reason to be experienced now. A collectible, a filmmaker visit, a themed event or an audience ritual can turn a screening into a time-specific proposition rather than another item waiting in a digital queue.

And Sometimes Even That Isn’t Enough
That is why “The Love That Remains” may ultimately be more revealing than “Sentimental Value.”

Jour2Fête invested around EUR €150,000 (USD $174,725) in P&A and released Pálmason’s film on roughly 50 prints in France. Admissions nevertheless remained below 20,000. In Czechia, Aerofilms mounted an unusually hands-on campaign but remained under 7,000 admissions. Anna Rampa summarized the contradiction plainly: “We tried really hard to approach broader audiences, but it didn’t really happen.”

Yet both distributors intend to keep following the filmmaker.

For Jour2Fête’s Johanna Mayer, that continuity is part of the economics of independent distribution. European support, she argued, is vital because commercial resonance can rise and fall across an auteur’s career. “It’s super important for us to grow with our [filmmakers],” she said, adding that without such support, sometimes it simply would not be possible.

This is where auteur distribution stops resembling a sequence of isolated bets and starts looking like portfolio economics. A breakout proves that breakout is possible; a difficult release exposes the machinery required to keep arthouse distribution functioning. The value of the relationship can only be understood across several films, not from a single opening weekend.

European backing therefore becomes structural rather than decorative. Without risk-sharing mechanisms, distributors would face ever stronger incentives to buy only films with stars, immediately communicable concepts or already overwhelming festival momentum.

The European Audiovisual Observatory’s figures reinforce the problem. Domestic markets typically generated between 62% and 66% of admissions to European films in 2024, while 63% of export admissions were still generated elsewhere in Europe. European cinema crosses borders, but its ability to achieve scale far beyond those borders remains limited.

The wrong conclusion is that the Nordic label needs to be marketed harder. The evidence suggests the opposite.

A film from Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki may travel as romance and deadpan comedy. A Trier title can move through stars, awards and emotional accessibility. Pálmason can be sold through landscape, artistic authorship and the accumulated value of a career built across festivals such as Locarno. A Norwegian or Danish debut can arrive at Karlovy Vary relatively unknown and leave carrying a ready-made theatrical narrative.

The Nordic label may open a door. A festival may help prop it open, but the distributor still has to persuade somebody to walk through it.

The post Nordic Cinema Doesn’t Have an Export Problem. It Has a Conversion Problem appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

That was one of the more interesting takeaways from one of the events panel discussions, “Exhibitors & Tech Partners Fueling Box-Office Growth.” Inevitably, much of the conversation turned to premium formats, as cinema industry panels tend to do these days. But the discussion moved beyond the familiar argument that audiences will pay more for experiences they can’t replicate at home.

The more complicated question is what happens once a multiplex contains several of those experiences.

A Portfolio, Not a Single Format
B&B Theatres, for instance, has built a strategy around offering moviegoers a range of formats and concepts rather than relying on one premium auditorium. Depending on the location, that can include the circuit’s proprietary Grand Screen, ScreenX, 4DX, MX4D, D-BOX, screenPLAY! and other concepts ranging from Max Relax seating to Lyric and Marquee Suites. “We love concepts. We love to give customers a lot of options,” said B&B Theatres’ Brock Bagby.

At a 12-screen location, Bagby said, perhaps half the auditoriums might contain some kind of differentiated concept while the remainder retain a more traditional recliner configuration. The idea is not to premiumize every room, but to give audiences a choice in how much they want to spend and how they want to experience a particular film.

“What we continue to find on movies such as ‘Spider-Man’ is people have their format they want, and they’re seeking it out,” Bagby said.

Premiumization is no longer necessarily about steering a moviegoer toward the biggest screen in the building. Increasingly, exhibitors are offering multiple versions of “premium,” each with its own technology, price point and value proposition.

Which creates another problem: moviegoers have to understand what all of them are.

Daniel Loria, editorial director of Boxoffice Pro and moderator of the CinéShow panel, summed up the evolution neatly. “We’ve gone from marketing a movie to marketing a theatre, and now we’re marketing auditoriums,” he said.

That may be one of the less discussed consequences of exhibition’s continuing investment in premium formats. A consumer may already understand what IMAX means. Explaining the difference between a circuit’s proprietary large format, motion seating, 4D, enhanced audio, an upgraded seating concept or some combination of those technologies requires more work.

The Branding Problem
Regal Chief Commercial Officer Adam Rymer acknowledged that branded offerings can be particularly challenging. “We all suffer a little bit from some of our proprietary formats, whether that’s XD or RPX or SuperScreen or whatever it might be, and having the consumers understand what that is,” he said.

For exhibitors, that means the marketing job doesn’t necessarily end when a studio convinces somebody to see a movie. The theatre still has to explain why the customer should see it in one auditorium rather than another, and why the experience merits an additional charge.

Bagby said B&B has increasingly tried to do that directly, including through a social video series in which he explains the technology behind various theatre concepts. “A lot of them don’t get it,” he said of consumers. “They know it’s a big-ass screen, right? But they don’t get anything else.”

Explain the sound system, screen or projection technology, however, and Bagby said audiences — including a new generation of technically curious cinephiles — become considerably more interested.

The challenge becomes even more complicated when studio marketing enters the equation. Rymer said Regal works with distributors to understand which premium formats they intend to support and to obtain marketing assets appropriate for individual locations. Sometimes, however, those efforts collide with format-specific studio campaigns.

Regal has received one-sheets promoting a film in IMAX for theatres where the circuit does not operate an IMAX auditorium. Putting that poster in the lobby can amount to advertising another theatre in the same market. “We’re basically promoting our competition,” Rymer said. “This is something we need to push back on.”

It is a small example of a much larger change in theatrical marketing. As premium formats proliferate, a studio campaign built around one branded experience may help sell the movie while simultaneously steering customers toward whichever exhibitor in a given market happens to offer that format.

Disney is already trying to address a version of this problem with Infinity Vision, the premium-auditorium certification and marketing program it unveiled at CinemaCon earlier this year. Disney’s head of global theatrical distribution, Andrew Cripps, said during an ICTA event in Barcelona in June that there were roughly 75 exhibitor-owned premium large format brands in North America and more than 320 worldwide. “It’s very difficult — impossible — for us to effectively market all of those brands,” Cripps said. Infinity Vision is intended, in part, to give Disney a common marketing label it can use to steer moviegoers toward qualifying premium auditoriums that might otherwise carry dozens of different exhibitor-owned names.

That doesn’t eliminate the branding problem. If anything, the need for a program like Infinity Vision illustrates how complicated the premium marketplace has become. A cinema may have invested substantially in an excellent proprietary large-format auditorium, but unless audiences understand what the name means, the exhibitor still has to persuade them that the experience is worth seeking out… and paying more for.

What the Market Will Bear
There is also no universal formula for deciding which premium experiences make sense.

Cinemark International President Valmir Fernandes said the premium-format conversation in Latin America has evolved much as it has in the United States, with exhibitors offering customers more choice, but price sensitivity makes the economics considerably different.

“The formulas that work for some premium formats here, cost-wise, don’t work necessarily in Latin America,” Fernandes said. That doesn’t mean audiences in the region won’t pay for premium experiences. Fernandes said they will, when the location and product are right. The challenge is being more selective about where to make the investment and how much of an upcharge a particular market can sustain.

Fernandes said one of the more reliable ways Cinemark has found to build that audience is through its loyalty program, steering its most frequent moviegoers toward premium formats first. “They value cinema more than the non-frequent user,” he said, and those members tend to be more receptive to trying a premium auditorium once they’re offered the chance. He described it as a lower-risk way to accelerate the shift from standard to premium screens, market by market, rather than relying on price cuts or broad marketing to do the job.

The same calculation applies within the United States. Bagby said B&B has learned to set lower base ticket prices in smaller markets, allowing it to add a premium-format surcharge without pushing the total ticket price beyond what the local market will bear.

“That’s something we actually had to learn the hard way in a couple markets,” he said.

The lesson is particularly relevant for independent and regional exhibitors looking at premium-format investments. Adding a premium auditorium is only one part of the equation. An operator also has to determine what the local audience will pay for it, how often suitable films will be available and how the format fits with the other auditoriums at the complex.

The Scheduling Problem
Pricing is only part of the calculation. The next challenge is keeping a premium room productive. As operators add more premium rooms, those screens become valuable assets that have to be kept productive. Rymer said Regal spends significant time analyzing when audiences are coming, which customers are likely to respond to a particular format and how different films might be scheduled across those screens. “You now have an asset inside of your theatres which needs to be monetized,” he said.

That becomes especially tricky when multiple films capable of supporting premium pricing arrive at roughly the same time.

It is one reason Lumma partner and board member Rolando Rodriguez argued that the next stage of premiumization may involve not simply adding a premium format, but adding enough differentiated experiences that an operator is not forced to choose between titles.

Rodriguez, whose company offers 4D E-Motion and the lower-cost Magnify 8 format, cited investments ranging from roughly $60,000 to $70,000 for Magnify 8 up through substantially more expensive large-format installations, with motion-seating auditoriums falling somewhere between.

The precise economics of any installation will naturally vary by theatre, market, utilization and deal structure. But the larger point echoed what exhibitors on the panel were saying: premium has become less a single category than a portfolio.

Nicole Woods, RealD’s vice president of cinema and content partnerships for the Americas, framed that same portfolio logic from the opposite direction: for exhibitors with 3D-capable auditoriums already in place, differentiated premium inventory may already be sitting in the building. RealD is encouraging operators to treat 3D as a year-round strategy — spanning animation, concert films, anime, horror and repertory releases — rather than as an occasional offering tied primarily to tentpoles.

Whether every one of those formats ultimately earns a meaningful premium from audiences will depend on the market. The important shift is that exhibitors are increasingly thinking about their auditoriums in much the same way they think about their film slate: as a collection of different products aimed at different customers.

That makes the multiplex of the future considerably more complicated to operate… and arguably more resilient, provided audiences can find their way to the right room.

Right now, exhibitors are largely solving that problem individually rather than collectively. Bagby’s answer has been to go directly to consumers himself, on camera, explaining what a laser projector actually does. Rymer’s answer has been to push back on studios for sending the wrong marketing assets to the wrong theatres. Both are reasonable responses to the same underlying gap: the industry has not yet developed a shared consumer vocabulary for premium formats comparable to the one IMAX built for itself over decades. Infinity Vision is one attempt at a shortcut. It won’t be the last.

For an industry that spent decades largely marketing what was playing, the next competitive battleground is explaining, room by room, why it’s worth paying more to watch it there instead.

The post Cinemas Aren’t Just Marketing Movies Anymore. They’re Marketing Auditoriums appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

At CinéShow 2026 in Dallas, two consecutive sessions examined different systems for reducing friction in theater operations. One focused on the technology and processes that help exhibitors identify lost sales; the other showed how redesigning the concession stand can make purchases faster and easier.

Two Panels, One Diagnosis
During “The Cost of Guessing in Theatre Operations,” speakers examined how exhibitors can use analytics, apps, kiosks and regular testing of the customer journey to identify operational friction that top-line sales figures may not reveal. Brandon Calder of CinemaPlus offered one particularly striking example.

Calder said the conversion funnels his company reviews sometimes show between 65% and 87% of customers who begin an online ticket purchase abandoning it before checkout. He did not present that as an industry-wide rate, but as evidence that exhibitors should investigate where their systems introduce friction — a broken page, payment redirect, difficult seat map, unexpected booking fee or slow mobile transaction.

The operations panel examined how technology, data and routine testing can expose and reduce those obstacles. In the session immediately afterward, Epic Theatres Director of Food and Beverage Dan Herrle applied the same principle to a more physical system: the concession stand.

“When you’re on your websites and you’re clicking through, where is that friction? What is stopping that transaction?” Herrle asked. “It’s the same thing that happens in the concession stand. Where is the friction? Why are people turned off? Why are they walking past your concession stand instead of just browsing and shopping and making it part of the experience?”

The alternative Herrle described looks less like a conventional concession counter and more like a retail marketplace. Customers move through a deliberately designed shopping area, pick up packaged products, serve themselves popcorn and beverages and complete the transaction at either a staffed register or self-checkout kiosk.

“It should be easy,” Herrle said. “We’ve got to remove that friction.”

From Line to Marketplace
In a traditional cinema lobby, the concession line is primarily a mechanism for keeping customers orderly while they wait to reach the counter. In a marketplace layout, the queue becomes part of the sales floor. Operators can place candy, packaged food, collectibles and other merchandise directly along the purchasing path, giving customers time to browse and decide before they ever reach the register.

A conventional counter, by contrast, processes customers largely one at a time: an employee takes an order, retrieves the products, fills drinks, handles payment and repeats. Even a simple transaction can become a bottleneck when several auditoriums are seating at once. Marketplace designs separate product selection from payment, so a guest who already knows what they want can move quickly while someone browsing does not block the next customer.

Herrle presented results from NCG Cinemas showing how consequential that change can be. NCG had started from an especially traditional model, with everything kept behind the concession stand and not even impulse candy racks positioned in front of customers. Working with NCG’s Jason Brown, Herrle said the circuit introduced a relatively simple queueing and grab-and-go system that let customers move through the space, pick up products and let other guests pass while they kept deciding.

According to figures NCG provided to Herrle, revenue increased 51% at one test location and 165% at another, while per-capita spending increased 41% and 36%, respectively. Herrle said the new system generated approximately $7,454 in additional monthly revenue and paid for itself in roughly two months.

Those unusually large increases should be considered in light of NCG’s starting point. A theater that already displays products throughout its concession area is unlikely to replicate the same gains. But the results demonstrate how much revenue can be constrained when nearly every purchasing decision must be made at the counter.

Putting a Buc-ee’s in the Lobby
Herrle’s marketplace vision extends beyond a few candy racks alongside a conventional queue.

“You can put a Buc-ee‘s in your lobby,” he said, invoking the Texas convenience-store chain known for turning roadside retail into something approaching a tourist attraction. That could include reach-in coolers, packaged food, novelty merchandise and even a bar, folded into the same shopping environment rather than operated as a separate destination. The approach lets an exhibitor expand its number of stock-keeping units without forcing every product to compete for limited menu-board space or a single coveted spot beside the register.

Design matters. Herrle pointed to Cinemark’s own queue redesign (credited to David Haywood, the circuit’s senior vice president of food and beverage) as a model: aisles wide enough for one customer to browse while another passes, low fixtures that preserve sightlines across the lobby, and familiar brands positioned at both the start and end of the shopping path to draw people in and reassure them on the way out.

The model also suits the growing assortment of film-related merchandise exhibitors now sell — premium popcorn buckets, drink vessels and collectibles priced well above the ticket itself, which are better suited to a retail display customers can browse and examine than to a line on a menu board. None of this means every lobby needs to become a convenience store. It means the product mix has outgrown the counter it’s traditionally sold from.

Self-Service Changes the Labor Equation
Every Epic Theatres location now uses a marketplace-style, grab-and-go model with self-checkout, Herrle said, with products barcoded and scanned at the end of the shopping path. One employee typically welcomes customers at the entrance; another stays near checkout to help when needed. “Customers know what to do,” Herrle said.

Self-service popcorn and Coca-Cola Freestyle machines extend the same logic. Herrle said customers enjoy filling and topping off their own popcorn, and that Freestyle machines encourage two people who might once have split a large drink to buy separate ones because they want different flavors.

The bigger change is staffing. Herrle said it is possible to run concessions at a 14-screen complex with one person behind the counter, supported by an usher overseeing self-service — a setup he said could replace work that might otherwise require five to seven employees. During a packed “Spider-Man” weekend, he said, Epic’s concession lines never built up; employees spent their time popping corn and restocking while customers moved through on their own.

On the operations panel, Rob Crocker of The Boxoffice Company described apps and kiosks as tools that can automate transactions and compensate for staffing constraints. Think of an app, he said, as “an employee that’s working for you 24/7 and never calls in sick.” Herrle’s marketplace model applies much the same principle to the physical concession stand: product selection, dispensing and payment no longer require an employee at every step. That flexibility matters in a business where traffic can move from quiet to hundreds of customers arriving before an evening show.

Employees are still needed — to welcome guests, restock, assist with kiosks and troubleshoot — but no longer to perform every stage of every transaction. Herrle said leaving customers entirely on their own isn’t the goal, even though he has seen the system keep running when an employee calls out sick. For exhibitors, the more useful measurement may be throughput per labor hour: how many customers a cinema can serve during its busiest periods, and how much they buy while they are there. Pairing self-checkout with cashless payment can add further savings by eliminating cash handling, trips to the bank and armored-car pickups.

Efficiency or Inconvenience?
Whether self-service feels like an improvement depends entirely on execution. A system that moves quickly and gives customers control feels convenient. One that leaves a guest confronting an unresponsive kiosk with nobody nearby to help merely exchanges one kind of friction for another.

The same applies to mobile ordering. Herrle said apps work well once a customer has already downloaded one and connected payment and loyalty information. Requiring someone to download an app, create an account and enter a credit card while sitting in an auditorium introduces precisely the obstacle the technology was supposed to remove.

The lesson isn’t that every human interaction should be automated. It’s that exhibitors need to distinguish between service that adds value and steps that exist mainly because that’s how the theater has always operated.

More Sales, Less Control
The marketplace model also asks operators to reconsider a principle that shaped concession design for decades: inventory control.

A traditional counter keeps most products behind employees, where customers cannot handle them before purchase. That reduces theft, limits waste and makes inventory easier to monitor. Moving products onto the sales floor inevitably creates more opportunity for shrinkage. Herrle said Epic has not experienced significant losses and that most customers scan and pay for everything they select. The circuit continues to inventory certain items but no longer treats the possible loss of an individual cup, bag or piece of candy as the overriding concern.

That is the fundamental tradeoff. Keeping every product behind the counter may reduce shrinkage, but if it slows service, discourages impulse purchases or causes customers to abandon the line, some of that control is being purchased with revenue the theater never records. A successful marketplace still requires disciplined replenishment and enough supervision to prevent self-checkout from becoming the new bottleneck. Control does not disappear; it shifts from restricting access to managing inventory and customer flow across the sales floor.

Converting Demand Already in the Building
Much of the cinema industry’s attention understandably focuses on creating demand: finding the right films, marketing them effectively and convincing audiences to leave home. The CinéShow discussions raised a more immediate question. Once someone has decided to visit a cinema, how much potential spending is lost because the transaction takes too long, the purchasing path is confusing or the theater lacks the capacity to serve everyone during a short peak?

“The number one data point that operators don’t focus enough on,” Calder said, “is not what sales did I close, it’s what sales did I not close, and why.” Herrle’s marketplace argument applies the same idea to the lobby instead of the website: the moviegoer who arrives prepared to buy concessions but meets a line or ordering process that makes the purchase feel like too much trouble. In both cases, the customer’s intent already exists. The operator simply fails to convert it.

Crocker recommended that exhibitors regularly become their own customers — buying tickets, joining loyalty programs, attempting refunds — and Calder added that they should do it on the mobile devices and cellular connections their audiences actually use, rather than testing everything on an office desktop with reliable broadband. The same principle belongs in the lobby: walk the concession queue at peak times, try to read the menu, pick up products and complete a purchase exactly as a customer would.

There is no single model for every theater. Older buildings may lack the lobby space for a retail-style queue, and some locations will keep benefiting from personal service where menus are more complex. Others may land on a hybrid: grab-and-go products and self-service beverages, backed by staffed registers. But the underlying question applies everywhere: how much of the concession operation is organized around making it easy for customers to buy, and how much simply reflects the way cinemas have always sold?

For decades, the concession counter controlled the transaction by placing an employee between the customer and nearly every product. The marketplace reverses that logic, putting customers inside the selling environment and asking employees to support the transaction rather than personally conduct every part of it.

The popcorn machine is not going anywhere. The line in front of it might.

The post The Cinema Concession Stand Is Becoming a Marketplace appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

All three are worth exhibitors’ attention. But it was Reagan’s acceptance speech — which veered almost immediately away from beer, box office and the usual industry thank-yous toward bombed-out cinemas and Ukrainian orphans — that left the room quiet in a way awards luncheons rarely do.

Cinergy and Halstead Take Home Inaugural Honors
Cinergy, the Dallas-based dine-in cinema and entertainment chain, picked up CinéShow’s first-ever marketing award for a five-person team led by Chief Marketing Officer Traci Hanlon and including Sydney Cruz, Jordan Michael, Elizabeth Ramirez and Melanie Yang.

The group has made a specialty of turning relatively small opportunities into outsized attention. A stolen Brad Pitt “F1” standee at Cinergy’s Odessa location became a “Where’s Brad?” social campaign that generated local news coverage, while a “The Devil Wears Prada 2” couture night and Prada bag giveaway became one of the year’s stronger promotional tie-ins.

It’s a reminder that as studios have thinned their own marketing ranks, the creative burden — and the audience-building payoff — has shifted further onto exhibitors themselves.

Halstead, Cinema United’s director of government relations and independent theatre owner engagement, received the inaugural Byron Berkley Leadership Award, named for the retired theatre owner and longtime industry leader who served as president of NATO of Texas, was instrumental in forming Theatre Owners of Mid-America — now Cinema United of Mid-America — was a founding board member of the Independent Cinema Alliance and played an important role in CinéShow’s growth.

The award recognized Halstead’s own contributions to the exhibition community, including helping launch CinéShow, building the regional organization that became Cinema United of Mid-America and, more recently, spearheading Cinema United’s Independent Theatre Owners Coalition.

Accepting the first award ever given in Berkley’s name, Halstead couldn’t resist a bit of humor before turning sincere.

“I’m humbled by this award, but that humbleness will pass,” he told the room.

He then said the honor meant so much “because of the name that’s on it.”

A beat.

“Mine.”

Eventually, Halstead got to the other name on the award, describing Berkley as a mentor and industry leader who taught him that leadership “isn’t just about being the loudest or taking credit. It’s about listening, giving people the opportunity to contribute, to grow, being collaborative, and keeping everyone focused on the goal.”

From a Bombed Threeplex in Irpin to a Rebuilt Shopping Mall
Then Reagan took the stage, and the room’s temperature changed.

The 72-year-old founder of Flix Brewhouse — who stepped down as CEO in 2022 but remains the company’s founder and executive chair, with Chance Robertson now running the 15-location, six-state chain — used most of his remarks not to talk about the dine-in cinema business he built, but about a small three-screen cinema in Ukraine he’d never set foot in before it was destroyed.

The theater, called Perun Cinema after the Slavic god of thunder and lightning, had opened in August 2018 inside the Giraffe Mall in Irpin, a Kyiv suburb of roughly 65,000 people. Russian forces destroyed much of the mall during the Battle of Irpin in the opening weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.

Searching for cinemas damaged in the invasion, Reagan tracked down Perun’s owners, who weren’t interested in rebuilding. They pointed him instead to the mall’s owners, who were.

“How could a middle-aged guy from a cinema chain known for brewing beer come and help?” he recalled asking himself.

Showing the CinéShow audience an image of the devastated property, Reagan didn’t soften the description. “This is what happens when war comes and visits you in your shopping center.”

What followed became, by Reagan’s account, Irpin’s first unsubsidized foreign commercial investment after the invasion — a loan with equity participation, done at deliberately favorable terms. “I didn’t do this to make money,” he said. The rebuilt Giraffe Mall reopened 20 December 2024, anchored by Silpo, Ukraine’s second-largest grocery chain, alongside JYSK, Comfy, Sinsay and EVA, and equipped with a backup generator and basement air raid shelter — requirements that change the operating calculus in ways American exhibitors rarely have to contemplate.

“We used to have guests squeamish that they might catch something bad from COVID if they go to the movies,” Reagan said. “Well, how about catching something coming through the roof that you didn’t expect?”

Reagan says the mall is now essentially fully occupied. A phase two, including a roughly 35,000-square-foot dine-in theater, is sketched out and waiting on a durable peace before construction starts.

It’s worth sitting with how unusual that sequence is for exhibition: a U.S. dine-in cinema operator becoming, almost by accident, the financing partner behind a foreign shopping center’s reconstruction in an active war zone — because a threeplex he initially set out to save couldn’t be saved, and he chose not to walk away. “Movie theaters do a whole lot more than show films,” Reagan said. “They create places where communities gather and lives can change.”

The Flixmobiles
Reagan’s second thread involved a documentary, “No Sleep Till Kyiv,” which Flix screened as part of a string of Ukraine-themed fundraiser nights — eight titles in total across Flix’s Round Rock, San Antonio, Frisco and Oklahoma City locations over three years — raising money for the Texas- and Kyiv-based Liberty Ukraine Foundation.

The film follows volunteers who source and prepare pickup trucks in Tallinn, Estonia, then drive them roughly 30 hours across Europe to Kyiv before handing the keys over to Ukrainian military units.

Reagan prescreened the documentary at home and came away convinced he could make the journey himself.

His wife was less enthusiastic. “You’re flipping crazy,” Reagan recalled her telling him.

He went anyway.

Reagan has since made the run twice — first in July 2025 and again this past May — as part of four total trips to Ukraine since 2023, totaling roughly 50 days on the ground.

The broader Help99 program typically moves 25 to 30 vehicles a month, Reagan said, with convoys divided into smaller groups for the drive across Europe. Reagan has dubbed the vehicles supported through his and Flix’s efforts the “Flixmobiles.” Five have now been donated through a combination of fundraising and direct support.

In his prepared remarks, Reagan said his May convoy included the truck program’s 1,000th donated vehicle, with 26 vehicles delivered during that single run. The organization has since passed 1,100 vehicles.

Each truck, Reagan said, is estimated to save an average of 50 lives. “So it’s a pretty good ROI,” he told the audience. “I promised we wouldn’t talk about ROIs, but to me, 50 lives saved for the price of a truck is a pretty darn good deal.”

One Flixmobile later turned up unexpectedly in Kyiv, where two of Reagan’s Giraffe Mall partners recognized it, stopped the driver and took a photograph with the vehicle.

Ukraine Finds Its Way Behind the Bar
There is another Ukraine connection that didn’t make it into Reagan’s CinéShow remarks.

Flix Brewhouse’s original Round Rock location has employed Ukrainian-born Oleksandra “Sasha” Berezhnyk as its head brewer since July 2023. Reagan says he had nothing to do with hiring her, only for the two to later discover some remarkably overlapping ground.

Berezhnyk has twice brewed a seasonal beer called Kutia, inspired by the traditional Ukrainian holiday dish made with wheatberries, poppy seeds, honey, dried fruit and nuts. She has also collaborated on recipes with Ukrainian breweries VarVar and Brewery 2085.

After Berezhnyk joined Flix, Reagan helped connect her with the Central Texas Ukrainian-American community.

Then came an even stranger coincidence.

On one of Reagan’s trips to Ukraine, he visited an underground brewpub where patrons continued eating and drinking while air raid sirens sounded above street level. He later discovered it was a place Berezhnyk had worked before coming to Texas.

For a company built around movies and beer, it would be difficult to devise a more improbable connection.

How to Help Keep the Story Going
Reagan pointed CinéShow attendees toward two organizations he has worked with personally.

Liberty Ukraine Foundation, an all-volunteer organization based in Texas and Kyiv, is currently mounting a $100,000 campaign for portable heat and power units ahead of winter, with another donor offering to match contributions up to $50,000.

Patriots for Ukraine serves as the U.S. fundraising arm supporting the Estonia-based organization behind the vehicle convoys, allowing U.S. donors to make tax-deductible contributions toward the effort.

Reagan named a third organization, Soborna Ukraine, which supports programs for children who have lost a parent in the war, mostly their fathers. Reagan told the room. “These kids really represent the future of Ukraine, and they deserve to live in peace and freedom.”

The connection back to cinema was never far away. “For us, movie theaters have always been places where communities gather to experience stories that can change lives,” Reagan said.

Four years ago, one destroyed neighborhood cinema led Reagan halfway around the world looking for a way to help. He never rebuilt that theater. Instead, the search led him to help rebuild the shopping center around it, raise money through cinemas thousands of miles away, drive vehicles across Europe into Ukraine and forge relationships he could not possibly have anticipated when he first went searching for a damaged threeplex in Irpin.

He closed with a line he said has stayed with him: “Freedom is not defended by extraordinary people alone. It’s defended when ordinary people decide to do extraordinary things together.”

Then Reagan returned to what Ukraine had taught him personally. “Ukraine has taught me that courage really is contagious. Thank you for helping keep freedom alive. Slava Ukraini!”

The post Cinergy and Cinema United’s Todd Halstead Honored at CinéShow as Flix Brewhouse’s Allan Reagan Puts Ukraine Center Stage appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.