Boxoffice Pro - October 2019

TECHNOLOGY
BY VASSILIKI MALOUCHOU
TheaterEars
DRIVING DIVERSITY THROUGH TECH
Hispanic audiences are America’s most active moviegoers. According
to the MPAA, they represent 18 percent of the U.S. population
but 24 percent of frequent moviegoers. They make up the highest
annual attendance per capita compared to any other ethnic group,
going to the movies an average of 4.7 times in 2018 (despite being
significantly underrepresented in both cast and crew). Yet the language
barrier prevents still more Latinx people from enjoying the
moviegoing experience.
DAN MANGRU
>> TheaterEars, a free, ad-based mobile app
that lets moviegoers access a Spanish-language
soundtrack on their phones, wants to bring more
Spanish speakers to the theater. The Florida-based
start-up uses the phone’s microphone to identify
and sync the film with its official Spanish audio
track, allowing viewers to listen
to it discreetly with a pair of
headphones as their screen dims.
The app is available in all theaters
in the United States and Puerto
Rico, with plans for an international
expansion in the making.
TheaterEars CEO Dan Mangru
describes the inspiration for
his app: “I was in Boca Raton,
Florida, and when two of my best
friends, Larry and Virginia—
who’s Colombian—got married,
Virginia’s mom came with her from Colombia.
Like many immigrants, she didn’t speak English
and she never really learned, as is the case with
many people who come to the U.S. after the age
of 30. As time went on, they had family movie
nights and they wanted to bring the mother-inlaw,
Maria, to the movies. She just didn’t want to
go because of the language barrier. The idea was,
why don’t we make an app in Spanish so that
she can go to the movies? So, we started to work
on TheaterEars,” says Mangru, whose mother is
from Puerto Rico. “This couldn’t have happened
20 years ago, but when the technology was ready,
I really wanted to pursue this and make it into
something real. I just knew how important that
was to individuals and how empowering it was
because language is such a barrier.”
According to a Pew Research study, more than
37 million Latinx people speak Spanish at home,
making it the most widely spoken language in the
U.S. after English. About 12.5 million Hispanics
ages 5 and older—or 30 percent of this group—are
not proficient in English. Another 3.2 million,
most of them foreign born, say they do not speak
English at all. Currently, almost half a million
people use TheaterEars, with 97.8 percent of them
speaking primarily Spanish.
The app was launched in 2017 with Disney’s
Coco, picking up more subscribers with blockbusters
such as Jumanji and Rampage. But the
project was years in the making, with almost
four years of R&D before the launch. Constant
attention to detail as well as innovation was necessary
to develop the app. “Dealing with audio, the
track can’t be pretty, or kinda, close,” says Mangu.
“It needs to be exactly dead-on or it’s going to be
a big strain. The technology always has its challenges
and it’s always evolving.
There’s always a new iPhone, a
new operating system. You’re
constantly working on improvements.”
An additional challenge
to launching the app was the
team’s lack of ties to the entertainment
industry. “I didn’t come
in from the industry with 20
years of entertainment contacts;
we had to introduce ourselves.
“The thing that we see the
most when people talk to us is
that the app helps them get closer. It’s bringing
people closer together and enables them to share
an experience that they couldn’t have before,” says
Mangru. In that same spirit of creating community,
the TheaterEars team works with social media
influencers for its marketing initiatives.
Studios, which provide the official audio for the
movies, play a central role in marketing campaigns.
With Disney-Pixar’s Coco campaign, for example,
news about the newly launched TheaterEars was
picked up by various media outlets. But Spanish-language
influencers have really propelled the
app’s publicity. “What’s really interesting is that
we don’t have a formal influencer program,” says
Mangu, “but we had people who genuinely enjoyed
and needed the product. Spanish-language influencers
found us. We’ve been very fortunate that
94 OCTOBER 2019