Cinema Sounds - History

History

The company was founded in 1920 by the Dubinsky Brothers (Maurice, Edward and Barney) who had been traveling the Midwest performing melodramas and tent shows with actress Jeanne Eagels. They purchased the Regent Theatre on 12th Street between Walnut and Grand in downtown Kansas City, Missouri.

The Dubinskys eventually changed their name to Durwood and the company was called Durwood Theatres.

In 1961, Edward's son, Stanley, took control of Durwood Theatres when his father died. Stanley had attended Harvard University and served as a navigator in the U.S. Air Force during World War II.

He renamed Durwood Theatres to "American Multi-Cinema, Inc.", and began to apply military management and the insights of management science to revolutionize the movie theatre industry. As he later explained to Variety, "We needed to define what our company was doing in the (exhibition) business. My dad wasn't that organized." It was founded on the belief that every "guest" (as AMC calls them) was to be treated first.

In 1963, AMC opened the two-screen Parkway Twin in a shopping center on Kansas City's Ward Parkway. Durwood later claimed that "in 1962 he was standing in the lobby of his 600-seat Roxy in Kansas City mulling over its poor grosses when he realized he could double his box office by adding a second screen and still operate with the same size staff." This insight arises from the fact that the real-time labor demands of a movie theatre are not constant. Rather, they come in bursts at the start and end of the movie. At the start, a large number of employees have to sell tickets, process tickets at an access point, sell food at the concession stand (a theatre's primary profit center), make sure the theatre is not overcrowded, and run the film projector. While the movie plays, a small number of employees are needed for security and access control, while the others are relatively idle, allowing them to restock concession items, clean restrooms, and clean the lobby. At the end of the movie, a number of employees are needed to clean the theatre for the next showing. When the start times for movie showings in several physically connected auditoriums are staggered correctly, one team can continually keep all of them operational with minimal downtime. An additional advantage is that a different movie can be shown in each auditorium, which increases the choices available at a theatre's box office at any given time, and minimizes the possibility that disappointed moviegoers will take their business to a different theatre altogether.

In retrospect, Durwood's idea seems simple, but it took a lot of trial and error to get the bugs out. For example, when the Parkway Twin opened, both screens were showing the same movie, The Great Escape. Next, Durwood followed up on the Parkway Twin with a four-screen theatre in 1966 and a six-screen theatre in 1969. It expanded nationwide in the 1980s.

AMC pioneered the first North American megaplex when it opened the AMC Grand 24 in Dallas, Texas, in 1995, though the first megaplex in the world had been built by European chain Kinepolis in 1988. (On May 27, 2010, AMC revealed that the AMC Grand 24 in Dallas would close before November 30, 2010, after AMC was unable to come to lease renewal terms with the property owner.) AMC continued to open megaplex theaters, such as the AMC Hampton Towne Center 24 in Hampton, Virginia in May 1998, which has a capacity of over 5,000 people (Virginia's largest). AMC also operates the busiest theater in the country at the AMC Empire 25 theater in New York City, New York, located near Times Square.

In the 1980s, AMC built and operated a number of multiplex ten-screen cinemas in the UK, including sites at locations such as Dudley and Tamworth. These were subsequently bought and taken over by UCI. In December, 20 1996 AMC open 20 Screens in Portugal (AMC Arrábida 20). In January 2002, the 16-screen Great Northern was opened in Manchester, which was later supplemented by the opening of a 12-screen cinema on the Broadway Plaza site in Birmingham in October 2003. United Kingdom outlets serve a dual function, they also cater to business conferences and companies can display spreadsheets and other things through a projector onto the cinema screen, this is in addition to the normal cinema functions.

In 2004, the company which at the time publicly traded on AMEX under the code AEN was acquired by Marquee Holdings Inc. Marquee is an investment vehicle controlled by affiliates of J.P. Morgan Partners, LLC, the private equity arm of JPMorgan Chase, and Apollo Global Management, a private investment firm. The company continues to officially be headquartered in Kansas City although it has sold its headquarters building at Ten Main Center where it now leases space.

In 2006, the company announced a new IPO expected to be worth approximately $789 million, however, adverse market conditions convinced the company's management to withdraw from such an offering on May 3, 2007. The company filed for a $450 million IPO, in its third such filing since 2006, on July 14, 2010.

On February 24, 2009, AMC's Board of Directors announced that long time CEO Peter Brown would be replaced by Gerardo I. Lopez as CEO and President effective March 2, 2009. Previously, Lopez was the Executive Vice President and President Consumer Products Group, Seattle's Best Coffee and Foodservice at Starbucks.

On March 26, 2009, AMC Entertainment announced that it will equip 1,500 of its screens with Real D projectors.

On March 28, 2009, AMC announced that it closed on a $315 million deal with Sony to replace all of its movie projectors with digital cinema projectors starting in the second quarter of 2009 and completing in 2012.

In September 2011, it announced plans to move its headquarters to a new $30 million four-story building designed by 360 Architecture in the Park Place development at 117th Street and Nall Avenue in Leawood, Kansas in suburban Kansas City. The State of Kansas had offered $47 million in incentives to get the 400 jobs to move.

In April 2012, AMC reached a settlement with the state of Illinois after complaints from a disability rights organization, accusing the company of only providing closed captioning or audio description systems at some of its locations in the state. AMC pledged to equip all of its theaters in the state with captioning and description services by 2014.

On May 21, 2012, Dalian Wanda Group, a Chinese conglomerate headquartered in Dalian, and AMC announced a $2.6 billion deal for Wanda Group to acquire AMC's 5,048 screens in 347 theaters in the U.S. and Canada. On September 4, 2012 Wang Jianlin, Chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group announced the closure of the deal. The acquisition makes Wanda the world's largest cinema chain. In addition Wang Jianlin announced that the Dalian Wanda Group plans to spend $500 million renovating AMC theatres.

AMC sold six of its eight Canadian theatres in July 2012: two (Kanata and Whitby) to Empire Theatres, and four others (including the locations in Toronto's Yonge-Dundas Square and Montreal's Forum) to Cineplex Entertainment. The theatres purchased by Cineplex were re-branded as Cineplex Odeon locations. Two locations were not included in the sales, presumably due to close proximity to existing (and more highly-attended) Cineplex theatres: the Kennedy Commons location in Scarborough (closed in late August 2012), and the Interchange 30 in Vaughan (which remains up for sale).