Movie theater

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 28th of December 1895, in the basement of the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris, a handful of curious strangers paid to watch moving pictures projected onto a wall. That moment is as close to a birth certificate as movie theaters have. The venue had no name for itself yet. No one had a word for what was happening. And yet within a decade, purpose-built halls were springing up across Europe and North America, charging five cents a seat and running films on loop all day long. How did a basement curiosity become the dominant form of public entertainment for over a century? What explains the peculiar economics of a business where popcorn earns an estimated 85% profit margin and every ticket costs the same regardless of how popular the film is? And what happened when television, then home video, then streaming, each tried to kill the theater and kept failing? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Ancestors of the Dark Room

  ›

  In 1799, Étienne-Gaspard Robert moved his Phantasmagorie show into an abandoned cloister near the Place Vendôme in Paris, using eerie surroundings, a graveyard, and ruins as the setting for his ghoulish spectacle. He was not projecting films; he was projecting fear, and audiences paid for it. The hunger for projected images in a darkened room is older than cinema itself.

  The Royal Polytechnic Institution in London opened in 1838 and drew crowds to magic lantern shows on a screen measuring 648 square feet, operated by a battery of six large lanterns running on tracked tables. Lecturers, pantomimes, and concerts all used the technology. Popular presentations included Henry Langdon Childe's dissolving views and his chromatrope.

  On the 15th of January 1847, Austrian magician Ludwig Döbler presented what is now recognized as the earliest known public screening of projected stroboscopic animation, at the Josephstadt Theatre in Vienna, using his patented Phantaskop. The show sold out in several European cities during a tour that ran until the spring of 1848.

  Émile Reynaud screened his Pantomimes Lumineuses animated movies from the 28th of October 1892 through March 1900 at the Musée Grévin in Paris. He gave over 12,800 shows to more than 500,000 visitors, with programs that included Pauvre Pierrot and Autour d'une cabine. That is a staggering number of paid admissions for a pre-cinema apparatus, and it suggests how ready the public was for what came next.

• 3. The First Commercial Houses

  ›

  Thomas Edison initially doubted that group screenings of film would be commercially viable. His company built and sold the Kinetoscope instead, a single-viewer peephole machine. A first public parlor opened on the 14th of April 1894, by the Holland Bros. at 1155 Broadway in New York City, on the corner of 27th Street. The venue had ten machines in parallel rows of five, each showing a different film. For 25 cents a viewer could see all five in one row; half a dollar bought the full bill.

  The Eidoloscope, devised by Eugene Augustin Lauste for the Latham family, opened to the public on the 20th of May 1895 in a lower Broadway store, showing films of a prize boxing fight filmed from the roof of Madison Square Garden on the 4th of May.

  Max Skladanowsky and his brother Emil demonstrated motion pictures with the Bioscop in July 1895 at a Berlin venue that would, by at least 1918, operate as a full-time movie theater, and between 1925 and 1994 as the Tivoli. The Skladanowsky brothers' first certain commercial screenings ran at the Wintergarten in Berlin from the 1st to the 31st of November 1895.

  The first building actually constructed to show motion pictures was built in Atlanta, Georgia, as part of The Cotton State Exposition on the 25th of September 1895, to demonstrate the Phantoscope, a device created by Jenkins and Armat. Ptuj City Cinema, in the oldest town of Slovenia, had its first commercial public screening on the 3rd of March 1897 and still operates, making it the oldest active commercial movie theater in the world. The Korsør Biograf Teater in Korsør, Denmark, opened in August 1908 and is the oldest known theater still in continuous operation since that date.

• 4. Design, Seating, and the Multiplex

  ›

  Samuel Roxy Rothafel, an early movie theater impresario, is credited with establishing the familiar characteristics of relatively low admission and open seating that became the default arrangement for early theaters. Many of those theaters included a balcony and rearward main-floor loge seats that were larger, softer, and more widely spaced, sold at a premium price.

  Stadium seating, which is often described as a modern innovation, actually dates to the 1920s. The 1922 Princess Theatre in Honolulu, Hawaii featured sharply raked rows extending from in front of the screen back toward the ceiling. Modern stadium seating was later adopted by IMAX theaters beginning in the early 1970s, because their very tall screens demanded it.

  Canada led the world into the era of multiple screens. The Elgin Theatre in Ottawa, Ontario became the first venue to offer two film programs on different screens in 1957, when Canadian theater-owner Nat Taylor converted the dual-screen setup to show two different movies simultaneously. Taylor later founded the Cineplex Odeon Corporation and opened the 18-screen Toronto Eaton Centre Cineplex, the world's largest at the time. In the United States, Stanley Durwood of American Multi-Cinema pioneered the multiplex in 1963, recognizing that multiple attached auditoriums could be run with the same staff required for one, through careful management of start times. Ward Parkway Center in Kansas City, Missouri had the first such multiplex in the US.

  The concept of the multiplex, developed in Canada in the 1950s, has since grown to facilities with up to thirty screens. A large multiplex with twenty or more screens is called a megaplex. The first megaplex is generally considered to be the Kinepolis in Brussels, Belgium, which opened in 1988 with 25 screens and a seating capacity of 7,500. Multiplexes and megaplexes typically draw audiences from an eight to twelve-mile radius, compared with a three to five-mile radius for smaller theaters, which puts smaller venues in direct competition for the same audience.

• 5. Sound, Screen, and Format Wars

  ›

  Since the 1970s, subwoofers have been used to deliver low-pitched sounds in movie theaters, and the amplification has only grown. A Cinemark theater manager explained to audiences who complained about loud trailers that the studios, not the theaters, set trailer sound levels.

  Fantasound, developed by RCA in 1940 for Disney's Fantasia, was an early interlock system that synchronized multiple projectors and sound units electronically. Early stereophonic films such as This Is Cinerama and House of Wax used a separate magnetic oxide-coated film to reproduce up to six or more tracks of stereophonic sound.

  IMAX uses 70 mm film with more than ten times the frame size of a 35 mm film. The first permanent IMAX theater was at Ontario Place in Toronto, Canada. The largest permanent IMAX cinema screen measures 38.80 by 21.00 meters and was verified at a theater in Leonberg, Germany on the 6th of December 2022. Since 2010, the majority of movie theaters have been equipped for digital cinema projection, removing the need to transport a physical film print on a heavy reel.

  In 2015, IMAX introduced an "IMAX with Laser" format using 4K resolution laser projectors. A wave of exhibitor-branded premium large format (PLF) auditoriums has since grown to compete with IMAX. In April 2026, Disney announced "Infinity Vision", a certification mark for PLFs offering the largest screens, laser projection, and premium audio. The September 2026 theatrical re-release of Avengers: Endgame will be the first release promoted under the program, with Avengers: Doomsday following in December.

• 6. 3D's Long, Unresolved History

  ›

  The earliest 3D movies were presented in the 1920s, and the format has been cycling through waves of excitement and disappointment ever since. In the 1950s, studios promoted 3D as a way to offer something that television could not deliver in living rooms.

  The so-called golden era of 3D film began in the early 1950s with Bwana Devil, the first color stereoscopic feature, which starred Robert Stack, Barbara Britton, and Nigel Bruce. In 1953, Columbia released Man in the Dark and Warner Bros. released House of Wax, the first 3D feature with stereophonic sound. James Mage, an early pioneer of the format, premiered his Triorama program in February 1953 using his 16 mm 3D Bolex system, with four shorts: Sunday In Stereo, Indian Summer, American Life, and This is Bolex Stereo. The first decline in the theatrical 3D craze started in August and September 1953.

  In 2009, movie exhibitors renewed serious interest in 3D. RealD expected 15,000 screens worldwide by 2010. One business reason for this push was that while overall ticket sales had declined, revenues from 3D tickets had grown, giving theaters a way to increase revenue per seat without selling more admissions.

  At Pathé theaters in the Netherlands, the extra fee for a 3D film consists of a fixed charge of 1.50 euros plus an optional 1 euro for the glasses. D-Box Technologies released its motion seat system to theaters in 2009, with Fast and Furious as the first feature film to support it. By January 2025, D-Box reported over 23,000 seat installations at 1,000 screens worldwide.

• 7. Economics and Survival

  ›

  Movie studios in the US have traditionally claimed as much as 100% of gross ticket revenue during the opening weeks of a film's release, with the balance shifting toward exhibitors at intervals that vary from film to film. Philip Drake, writing in The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, states that box office takings currently account for less than a quarter of total film revenues and have become increasingly front-loaded, with the majority of receipts earned in the opening two weeks.

  Concession revenue exists partly to compensate for this arrangement. It has been estimated that movie theaters make an 85% profit at the concession stand, and that the retail price of movie-theater popcorn is roughly nine times what it costs to produce. In Canada, the total operating revenue in the movie theater industry was 1.7 billion dollars in 2012, an 8.4% increase from 2010, with box office and concession revenue combined accounting for 91.9% of total operating revenue.

  Ticket pricing in the US is famously uniform regardless of a film's popularity or production budget. This stands in contrast to rock concerts, where a popular performer's tickets cost substantially more. The source of that uniformity is economic: demand for films is nearly impossible to predict in advance. Gigli, which starred Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, became a box-office bomb despite its stars, while low-budget films with unknown actors such as The Blair Witch Project became major hits.

  A Pew Media survey from 2006 found that respondents watched movies at home versus in a theater at a five to one ratio, and 75% said their preferred way of watching was at home. In the US, the number of tickets sold fell nearly 11% between 2004 and 2013 while box office revenue increased 17%, because ticket prices rose. By 2015, the US had a total of 40,547 screens, a number that reflects consolidation around major chains: Regal Cinemas operated 7,334 screens in 588 theaters, AMC Theatres operated 5,206 screens in 346 theaters, and Cinemark operated 4,457 screens in 334 theaters.

• 8. The World Outside the Multiplex

  ›

  Drive-in movie theaters, once numbering in the thousands in the United States, had declined to about 300 locations by the time the source material was written. They were especially popular in the 1950s and 1960s, using portable loudspeakers at each parking space, or broadcasting sound on an FM frequency to be played through a car's stereo system.

  In 1967, the British government launched seven custom-built mobile cinema units as part of a Ministry of Technology campaign to raise standards. These 27-seat vehicles were built on a Bedford SB3 chassis with a custom Coventry Steel Caravan extruded aluminum body. The Sol Cinema in the UK, a converted 1972 caravan, has toured since 2010 as the world's smallest solar-powered mobile cinema, seating 8 to 10 at a time. In 2015 it appeared in a Lenovo advertisement.

  In the 1980s, the introduction of VHS made video-salons possible, especially in the Soviet Union, where official distribution companies were slow to respond to changing tastes and so theaters could not show popular Hollywood and Asian films through normal channels.

  The smallest purpose-built cinema on record is the Cabiria Cine-Cafe in Brasília, Brazil, which measures 24 square meters and seats 18. It was built by Renata Carneiro Agostinho da Silva in 2008 and was listed in the 2010 Guinness World Records. The New Parkway Museum in Oakland, California replaces standard seating with couches and coffee tables and serves a full restaurant menu rather than standard concessions, representing one of many experiments in what the theater-going experience could become when the multiplex model is set aside.