Boxoffice - June 2018

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GUEST COLUMN The moviegoing experience has always been in a state of flux. If you haven’t gone to the movies in the last 20 years, you’d be astonished by the culinary and entertainment options available today. While many changes have occurred incrementally, some milestones have changed the experience dramatically. by Bruce Proctor These 10 advancements arose at the nexus of technology and consumer preference and have forever changed the way we experience a night at the movies. And with the pace of change ever increasing, it may not be long before we add another 10 things to the list—or more. See you at the movies! TALKIES The first moving picture was released back in 1890. For the next 35 years, movies were silent; they featured musical scores—sometimes performed live, sometimes recorded—but dialogue was displayed on title cards called “intertitles,” similar to today’s subtitling. Then in 1927, the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (below), debuted. It soon became clear that talkies represented a better entertainment value for consumers and a more profitable product for producers. After 1930, virtually all movies were talkies (until the release of Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie in 1976). FOOD AND BEVERAGES Enjoying a snack and a drink is a natural part of the cinema experience today, but it hasn’t always been that way. Around the turn of the last century when theaters first started shifting from live performances to movies, most owners remained dead-set against serving food in their theaters. They saw it as a distraction from the show and a janitorial nightmare. But more importantly, they thought it was beneath the “elevated” level of the theater experience. Then the Great Depression hit. As financial hardship exerted downward pressure on ticket sales and attendance fell by nearly a third, the revenue that food could generate became too tempting to ignore. So the sound of popping popcorn began to fill cinema lobbies across the U.S., and new theaters almost universally included candy counters, the precursor to modern-day concession stands. Perhaps one good thing did come out of the Great Depression after all. FOUNTAIN DRINKS In the early days of cinema, soft drinks were available only in bottles. Eventually, pre-mix fountain drinks were offered as well. At the time, both bottled and fountain drinks were served to customers by theater staff, but the evolution continued. Pre-mix led to post-mix, and post-mix led to self-serve. Today’s freestyle machines (right) are the next step in this progression, dispensing beverages faster than ever before and enabling patrons to customize their drinks to an almost infinite degree. 48 BOXOFFICE ® JUNE <strong>2018</strong>
MULTIPLEXES In 1963, Stan Durwood of American Multi-Cinema built the first multiple-screen theater in Kansas City, Missouri. For the first time, multiscreen cinemas gave moviegoers a choice—and they loved it. Multiplexes quickly became the norm just as the number of screens in the United States was set to explode. Today, the vast majority of the 40,000 screens in the U.S. are part of a multiplex facility, and the largest multiplex in the world—or more accurately, the largest megaplex in the world—is the AMC Ontario (below), which features no less than 30 auditoriums inside a single theater. SELF-SERVE It used to be that if you wanted candy, popcorn, or drinks, a theater employee would prepare your order and serve it to you. The station concept, built on the fast-food idea of prepping in the back and serving in the front, sped things up, but infuriatingly long lines remained the norm. Then, self-serve foods became widely available and customers took to them right away. Today, moviegoers are accustomed to choosing the food and drinks they prefer in a cafeteria-style, grab-n-go setting, which creates a more satisfying experience for them while lowering theater overhead. STADIUM SEATING PROJECTION The 35-millimeter reel was adopted as an international standard in 1909. It remained in use through the 1990s when digital technology entered the scene. Once the benefits became evident, digital projection caught on quickly; in 2000 there were 30 theaters featuring digital projection—a decade later, that number would exceed 36,000. Today, most commercial movie projectors support either 2K or 4K resolution and employ a xenon, UHP, or laser light source, providing a product that is light years ahead of the flickering, scratchy, unreliable celluloid of early cinema. In the last two decades, the shift to luxury seating has made attending a movie a much more comfortable experience. Cushy and supportive, reclining stadium seats relegate the old theater flip-up seat (oh, my aching back!) to the scrap heap of history. And luxury seats are not just more comfortable; they’re more convenient as well. Large, padded armrests, extending footrests, cup holders, stash-away tables, and call buttons put the customer in control. Some seats even move, bounce, and jolt to enable viewers to feel the visceral intensity of the action on the screen. Hold on, it’s going to be a wild ride! SOUND Sound has come a long way in cinema. The Jazz Singer was recorded in Vitaphone, which involved the painstaking, archaic process of recording all audio onto a single record. Subsequent talkies offered scratchy mono-channel sound, which would often produce the unsettling effect of seeing an actor on one side of the screen while his voice came from the other. Alan Blumlein, a British engineer, developed stereo sound in 1934 to solve this problem. In 1940, Disney’s Fantasia was the first film to use surround sound, an improvement over stereo (and also a Blumlein invention). Dolby noise reduction was used by Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange, released in 1971. THX was first used in Return of the Jedi in 1983. The mid 1990s saw the advent of digital sound, a huge step forward in terms of fidelity that quickly replaced analogue magnetic sound industry wide. Dolby Atmos, an adaptive-rendering technology that assigns sounds to screen objects to create realistic soundscapes, is one of the most recent developments in sound. It debuted in the Pixar film Brave in 2012. These sound improvements ensure that cinephiles’ ears are as happy as their eyes. IN-THEATER DINING The in-theater dining concept encourages customers to come earlier, stay longer, and spend more. Introduced nearly 20 years ago, in-theater dining service has four basic levels: counter order/patron pickup; counter order/seat delivery; seat order/seat delivery, single service; and seat order/seat delivery, ongoing. Regardless of service level, in-theater dining has helped theater owners boost their revenue and has given customers a compelling new reason to go to the movies. n BEER, WINE, LIQUOR “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, I hope they walk into mine.” This might be the mantra of today’s theater owners. The addition of alcoholic drinks to menu offerings can increase theater revenue by as much as 10 percent. In an environment where every dollar counts, this bump is too important to ignore. Bruce Proctor is president of Proctor Companies, which designs and builds food and beverage venues for movie theaters around the world. He is certified as an Executive Concession Manager by NAC and still loves going to the movies. JUNE <strong>2018</strong> BOXOFFICE ® 49
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Boxoffice - June 2018

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