Show Me the Canada

ShowCanada wrapped up yesterday with a dinner atop Grouse Mountain. Surprisingly, not much grousing at the conference's Westin Bayshore home base these past couple days, with delegates from Canada's movie theatres in holiday moods, gobbling up food and drink, winning door prize trips to Hollywood and feeling the importance that comes with seeing previews of films by studio and distribution sponsors.

Corinne Lea from the Rio tried to speak up at the closing panel, asking one of the Cineplex Robs to stop muscling distributors into allowing Cineplex exclusive access to first-run films, both for greater profit, of course, but more insidiously, to starve out the independent theatres who have to wait sometimes as much as six months after a film's release to get it for a second-run screening -- only to be told by the Movie Theatre Association of Canada moderator, "Corinne, this is not the place for this discussion." But if not there, then where?

Cineplex accounts for over 70% of the Canadian exhibitor market, a statistic that goes up less through the growth of the company than as a result of a rapidly shrinking independent theatre culture. If this were the U.S., Cineplex would be considered a combine, taken to court and, in the spirit of capitalism, ordered to sell off enough assets (at market price, of course) to be competitive (as opposed to monopolistic). But this being Canada, where we are told by those defending combines that our market is too small and spread out to be served by a bunch of little guys, a different set of rules apply -- different in this case because they favour those convenient combines.

I imagine things will look a lot different by the next ShowCanada conference, with Cineplex already having branched out into distribution with Lions Gate Pictures, as discussed in a January 2023 article by the Globe & Mail's Barry Herz (after becoming a distributor, will Cineplex get into streaming, too?). Interestingly, Herz was given an award at the conference for his industry coverage. He must have known of his award because when I asked the conference contact person Carrie Wolfe (of MTAC) for a media pass for a story I was commissioned to write for The Tyee, I was told "we do not accredit press for the conference." Will Barry Herz be filing a story on ShowCanada, or does his award preclude him from doing so?