If the Cheesecake Factory were a city, it would be Las Vegas — and I love Cheesecake Factory, but I am not trying to stay in there for five days which is the duration of CinemaCon, an event the average person outside of Hollywood would know nothing about — and they probably wouldn’t care much about it outside of the cool footage and the celebrity of it all.
Organized by the National Association of Theater Owners (the other NATO), the annual event falls in the category of “con” or convention as it is exactly that. NATO launched in 1965 and started ShoWest, a convention where movie theater owners, their partners, and Hollywood studios gather to preview the theatrical slate for the upcoming year. The event was rebranded in 2011 as CinemaCon and NATO has since become the sole organizer.
CinemaCon has grown into a major event for Hollywood types who wade into the waters of theatrical exhibition, distribution, marketing, publicity, and advertising. And of course, the press is there including yours truly.
That said, there is a lot to unpack from this event which includes a trade show of new theater wares as well as complimentary popcorn and candy as far as the eye can see on the convention floor in Caesar’s Palace. It is a different vibe from other Hollywood-centric events when it comes to the attendees because CinemaCon is all about the bottom line.
I attended my first CinemaCon last year and it was a huge reminder that Hollywood is a multibillion-dollar industry. The event is, in simple terms, major Hollywood studios presenting their movies for the upcoming year on a fancy platter (many times with celebrities) to theater owners from all over the world. All the while, Hollywood head honchos put smiles on their faces and give very corporate presentations that include an abundance of box office numbers, some fun Dad jokes, and not much about how the movies were critically received or how they impacted the culture. And why would that matter at a conference like this? Everyone has dollar signs in their eyes because part of moviemaking is making coin with your art. Basically, these studio execs are saying “Please put our movies on as many of your screens as possible so that we can both make money!” to all the theatre owners sitting in the Colosseum Theater at Caesars Palace.
As I sat through four days of presentations from Warner Bros., Lionsgate, Universal Pictures, Paramount, and Disney, I was very much excited by a lot of the film clips they showed — specifically Disney’s 75 minutes of exclusive footage from upcoming projects Inside Out 2, Captain America: Brave New World, Moana 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, and the forthcoming King of Pop biopic Michael directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jaafar Jackson, Colman Domingo, and Nia Long. Warner Bros. gave us hearty sneak peeks of the Beetlejuice sequel and Bong Joon-Ho‘s forthcoming sci-fi Mickey 17 starring Robert Pattinson, a film based on Ashton Edward‘s novel Mickey 7. The film follows the titular character Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) who is dubbed an “expendable”, a space colonist who does the most dangerous work and often dies. However, he can be brought back to life through human printing technology. In the book, they stop at the seventh Mickey, but in the movie, director Bong said they kill him 10 more times — hence Mickey 17.
The convention also included the premiere of the new Joker: Folie à Deux trailer and an extended look a George Miller‘s Furiosa starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, the latest addition to the director’s Mad Max magnum opus. In one of the biggest moments of the convention, Warner Bros. “planted” tulips in the Colosseum that glowed green and pink during the nourishing and jaw-dropping It was also fun to have Universal screen The Fall Guy and NEON, a studio that is fairly new to the CinemaCon space, screen Babes at the convention. Amazon MGM Studios is also inching its way to more involvement with CinemaCon as they had a low-key presentation for exhibitors and select press.
There was a comfortable familiarity with the “content” part of CinemaCon, but not used to performative business talk. Buzzwords and phrases that ran rampant in various iterations throughout the presentations were “diverse slate” and “original content” and “theatrical experience” and “the power of the movie”. And with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes as well as the aftermath of the pandemic and racial reckoning, the execs weren’t being pollyanna about how Hollywood is on fire. They just put it in words that weren’t as harsh. During the Disney presentation, Co-chairman of Disney Entertainment Alan Bergman said: “The year has been hard on all of us.” The “all of us” in that statement can raise some eyebrows when a Hollywood exec is saying it but we don’t have time to talk about pay inequities and unbalanced division of wealth and power in the industry.
CinemaCon is one very thick money-coated surface of an industry that has many different, ever-evolving layers. The event is an interesting creature that isn’t even really a convention about the art of movies. It’s about movie theaters and the box office. End of story. Sure, some may have thought that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was utter garbage with its 46% Rotten Tomatoes score, but raked in over $476 million at the global box office making it the 11th highest-grossing movie of 2023. The same goes for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. The DC sequel starring Jason Momoa was largely panned by critics with a 34% Rotten Tomatoes score — but it made bank at the box office earning $434.4 million at the global box office, making it the 14th highest-grossing movie of 2023. It’s a similar story for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (52% on RT) and Meg 2: The Trench (27% on RT), both of which earned enough bread to make them sit comfortably in the top 20. In a way, the quality of storytelling or critical acclaim doesn’t really have a huge part in the CinemaCon equation. If it can be projected on a movie theatre screen and give the studios and exhibitors loads of money, that’s what matters the most.
However, when it comes to controversy, CinemaCon stays neutral which is infuriating considering some of the choices they make. Last year, they screened The Flash starring the problematic Ezra Miller. This was a case when the box office results and the critical response were simpatico. It earned a little over $271 million at the box office and critics landed at 63% on RT with it.
This year, Lionsgate premiered the trailer for a new Red Eye-ish thriller Flight Risk directed by not-so-beloved Mel Gibson and starring Mark Wahlberg, an actor who many of my Asian siblings take issue with. Titles like these may make it hard to sit through moments at CinemaCon and make me realize no one in that room is focused on the news of Ezra Miller allegedly choking a woman at a bar in Iceland and grooming a young woman. They also aren’t thinking about that one time when Mark Wahlberg assaulted two Vietnamese men or that Mel Gibson has a whole boatload of accusations of being anti-semitic. It’s not to say the people at CinemaCon don’t care about this. It’s just not relevant in this space. It just makes infuriating sense.
CinemaCon reminds me of old-school New York Fashion Week when designers would show their collections on the runway and buyers would be in the audience. Except with CinemaCon, they are showcasing blockbusters, rom-com, dramas, and fantasy epics on a screen instead of red carpet gowns, sportswear, three-piece suits, and stilettos on a catwalk. The yearly event bolsters the fact that filmmaking is the epitome of the intersection of art and commerce. You can say the same for TV or any sort of storytelling. Both must exist but valuing art and commerce on the same level has been a tug-of-war between artists and suits because the balancing act is impossible — but it is a necessity for filmmakers, storytellers, and artists of all kinds. The artists usually have more to lose in the battle.
CinemaCon fascinates me. It’s a different, more business-minded, and buttoned-up crowd. It’s capitalism at its finest in the epicenter of hyper-consumerism. It’s also an event that braves the rough tides of the future of movie theatres while preserving the traditional movie-going experience.
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