The Cineplex Beverly Center

On this episode, we take a look back not at the career of an actor or director, nor about a specific movie or a distributor, but at a movie theatre that opened forty years ago today, that would change the course of the theatrical exhibition industry forever: The Cineplex Beverly Center.

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The Beverly Center and its flagship movie theatre, the first theatre in America to have a double-digit number of screens under one roof, opened on July 16th, 1982, and the theatre would quickly become one of the busiest movie theatres in the country, and whose success would help drive an astounding wave of new builds and acquisitions that would take Cineplex from a single theatre complex in Toronto to the biggest exhibitor in North America in less than ten years.

In addition to the host's personal recollections of working at the theatre in the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s, we also talk to film historian, author and UCSB professor Ross Melnick about the impact the theatre had on the entire film industry.