Multiplex theaters
Multiplex theaters are a modern evolution of the traditional movie-going experience, originating from the need to accommodate a larger audience with diverse film choices. These theaters typically consist of multiple smaller screening rooms within a single building, allowing several films to be shown simultaneously. The concept gained traction in the 1980s when entrepreneurs recognized that it was more efficient to fill multiple smaller auditoriums with audiences than to rely on a single large one. Located often within shopping malls, multiplexes benefit from high foot traffic, providing easy access for both moviegoers and shoppers.
Initially featuring two to six screens, multiplex theaters have expanded significantly, with some now boasting up to eighteen screens or more, catering to thousands of film enthusiasts daily. This shift also marked a transition in ownership, as corporate chains began to dominate the theater landscape. In response to the rise of at-home viewing options, the multiplex format evolved further into megaplexes, which offer even more screens and varied showtimes. Through these developments, multiplex theaters have transformed the landscape of film exhibition, enhancing public access and consumer choice in an increasingly competitive market.
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Multiplex theaters
Movie venues that show multiple features simultaneously on multiple screens
In the 1980’s, individual, large movie theaters began to divide themselves into several smaller viewing spaces, each with fewer seats and frequently with smaller screens. The move enabled each venue to show more than one film at a time, usually with multiple starting times, thereby maximizing consumer access and economic profitability.
Movies in the United States were often first shown in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in lavish vaudeville theaters. The first single-purpose movie theaters were more modest storefront venues called nickelodeons, but as the cinema began to court a wealthier audience, movie theaters began to be constructed to resemble the lavish theaters of vaudeville and the legitimate stage. These so-called picture palaces featured stages, lighting grids, orchestra pits, and elaborate lobbies. Their auditoriums could seat up to two thousand viewers at once, featured very large screens, and were usually located in single, stand-alone buildings.
By the 1980’s, entrepreneurs began to divide such large, single auditoriums into sets of smaller theaters called multiplexes. They found it easier, for example, to fill four theaters showing four films to three hundred people each than it was to fill a single theater with twelve hundred fans of a single film. As this exhibition model became popular, multiplexes began to be constructed in the emerging shopping malls. The first such venues had anywhere from two to six smaller screens, each with less seating capacity than a standard theater. By relocating to the shopping malls, the multiplexes were able to capitalize upon malls’ high volumes of foot traffic, drawing audiences from passersby and shoppers, in addition to those who made the trip specifically to see a movie. Although smaller in size, they had the capacity to show several different films at the same time, or the same film at a variety of times, thus increasing public access, consumer choice, and industry profits. Multiplexes grew to include up to eighteen screens, gaining the capacity to handle thousands of filmgoers per day.
Impact
Multiplex theaters resulted from market forces that transformed the traditional format for film presentation. Stanley Durwood originally produced the modifications that would lead from the single-theater complex to the multiplex in 1963. He subdivided his Roxy Theatre in 1964 and found he could save money overall with one staff and a single lobby at the heart of a complex of multiple screens. By the end of the 1980’s, a further modified form resulted: the megaplex, which was a stand-alone structure with eighteen to twenty-four screens and dozens of starting times. The multiplex was notable also in that during the 1980’s ownership of theaters moved out of individual investors’ hands and into corporate control, as chains of movie houses continued to grow beyond the multiplex. By the end of the 1980’s, new media such as videotape, laserdiscs, cable television, and computers had led to more people than ever watching movies at home or at other venues outside the theater, prompting the enlarging of the multiplex theaters into megaplexes, as the theater industry fought to compete in an ever-diversifying market.
Bibliography
Beyard, Michael D. Developing Retail Entertainment Destinations. Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 2001.
Klinger, Barbara. Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.