Cinema Circuits: Domestic Theater Chains, Global Exhibition Practice, and Industrial Standards in Formation, 1992 to 2019

Since the early 2000s, major domestic theater chains in the United States and Canada have responded to economic pressures and the existential threat of home and mobile entertainment options by dramatically reshaping the industry: pursuing aggressive consolidation of chains, introducing new technologies and services as premium screening options, and diversifying their holdings in areas parallel to and outside the exhibition sector. Simultaneously, these theaters have become outlets for global technology providers, like IMAX, RealD, Dolby, and CJ 4DPLEX, and assets in the exhibition empires of international companies including China’s Dalian Wanda and the UK’s Cineworld. Driving these parallel currents of change is a historical transformation of the cultural status of theater chains, negotiated, maintained, and mediated by the industrial activity of film exhibitors. Focusing on the activities of the top four exhibitors in the US-Canada market—AMC Theatres, Cinemark Theatres, Regal Cinemas, and Cineplex Entertainment—my dissertation seeks to examine how the twin positions these “exhibition giants” occupy as powerful actors in the domestic exhibition industry and one member of globally dispersed exhibition circuits and distribution flows makes them crucial nodes mediating between the levels of global industry, domestic market, and local cultural experience in this transformed context.Examining this emerging cultural-industrial landscape, my research asks: How have major US and Canadian exhibitors reconfigured the cultural value of movie theaters through shifts in their industrial practices and discourses since the early 1990s? How have structural transformations within the exhibition sector enabled and influenced these changes? What investments has this transition prompted from global technology brands and exhibition empires and how have these actors redefined the activities of domestic exhibitors within their own projects?Drawing from research on media industry studies, my dissertation challenges these divisions to offer an account of film exhibition as a globalized industry, in part by focusing on major exhibitors whose size makes them crucial industrial influences and assets, situates them in and across localities, and implicates them in highly heterogenous practices. With this understanding, I examine emerging exhibitor activities using methodologies of textual and economic analysis within media industry studies. I analyze information from industrial sources including trade and popular periodicals, press releases, and financial reports. Through these materials, I establish historical trajectories of emerging exhibition practices and assess the common-sense ideas exhibitors deploy as they legitimate these activities among themselves, with partners and owners, and to the public. This analysis also involves tracing the way these economic and cultural activities create cultural distinction between and through audience members through the dynamics of taste within consumer culture. Finally, I will examine the way these intertwined aspects of economy and culture are shaped and constrained as they move across the registers of the local, national, and global, and how they in turn contribute to the construction of these spatial dimensions.I argue that the development of a domestic oligopoly in the US-Canada market, developing out of the overlapping interests of private equity investors and large corporate theater chains in the 1990s and 2000s, set the stage not only for the restructuring of the exhibition industry, but for the most transformative developments in 2000s and 2010s exhibition practice. Domestic exhibition giants established dominant national circuits and used their scale, power, and capital to establish new revenue streams, facilitate the transition to digital cinema, standardize new premium screening options, and attract affluent cinemagoers, using each step to further cement their control of the domestic exhibition industry. Their effectiveness in this aim, during a period of retraction from international expansion by US exhibitors, made them the acquisition targets of foreign exhibition companies Wanda and Cineworld, ushering in a new stage of international connectivity in the exhibition industry and completing the integration of domestic film exhibition into the networks of global media and capital.

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