After spending even a short time with Jane Hastings, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Australia-based EVT, one might walk away describing her with adjectives that could easily be viewed as sycophantic. Intelligent, attentive, inspiring, brave, optimistic, ambitious, impressive and thoughtful is verbiage that might ordinarily be faulted for being hyperbolic when characterizing a C-suite executive, however in Hastings case, these are all the traits that have helped her build a successful career leading right up to her current role heading up EVT, a public company that operates cinemas in three countries and has a market cap of AUD $2 billion (USD $1.27 billion) and annual revenue topping AUD $1 billion (USD $635 billion). It’s also likely why industry colleagues from around the world nominated Hastings last year for the premiere spot in CJ Top Women in Global Cinema list.

Despite her title and position within EVT, anyone who gets a chance to speak with Hastings may find themselves doing most of the talking, which is by design on her part. “In every industry I’ve gone into, if you’re a good listener, and I mean truly listen, are really open to their feedback from customers on what’s not working and what is working and what they want, you will find profitable operating models to deliver on that,” Hastings said when asked how she has built a thriving career, running profitable businesses. “Then you listen to employees, because they’re facing customers every day, and because ideas these days can come from someone on your team with only one month’s experience, all the way up to someone with 20years’ experience. If you’re able to take both customer and employee perspectives into your business, make solid decisions, be accountable and be brave and able to pivot, then you’ll find successful solutions.”

Becoming Hurricane Jane
Growing up the youngest of four children in Papatoetoe, a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, Hastings has been finding successful solutions since she began her career in the aviation industry as a product and marketing manager with Air New Zealand. She headed off to Hong Kong to consult with Cathay Pacific and spent eight years in Asia, including Japan and Singapore, working as a senior manager for numerous companies including advertising giants like Interpublic and Omnicom. Hastings headed home to New Zealand in 2008 to take up a senior management position with SkyCity Entertainment Group where she eventually helped facilitate the sale of SkyCity Cinemas to Event Hospitality & Entertainment Limited (which later was rebranded as EVT) for NZD $61 million (USD $44.2 million). Hastings took over as General Manager of Cinema Operations in New Zealand for Event Cinemas in 2010 and was quickly promoted to General Manager Entertainment in 2011, requiring a move to Sydney, Australia.

By the fourth quarter of 2012, Hastings was back in New Zealand as the CEO of The Radio Network (TRN) where the strategy she implemented generated double digit earnings growth. When TRN merged with the newspaper publisher APN New Zealand and e-commerce leader GrabOne, Hastings was named the new conglomerates’ CEO and relaunched the company as New Zealand Media and Entertainment (NZME). Under her leadership all three businesses successfully merged into one of the country’s largest integrated media companies.

Having been nicknamed “Hurricane Jane” by colleagues and competitors, Hastings’ reputation as a successful senior manager led Event to rehire her in 2016, this time as Chief Operating Officer. It was back to Sydney, Australia for Hastings where she would spend less than a year in the role before being promoted to her current position as CEO. Today, the company has been rebranded as EVT (more on that in a moment), which stands for Entertainment, Ventures and Travel – the three core markets in which it operates. In over seven years at the helm, Hastings has overseen the 115-year-old company into the largest motion picture exhibitor in Australia (65 locations, 624 screens), New Zealand (20 locations, 139 screens) and Germany (44 locations, 348 screens). On the ventures side EVT owns and manages over AUD $2 billion ( USD $1.27 billion) worth of real estate properties and their travel operations consist of 85 hotel locations comprising over 12,000 rooms. And let’s not forget about their alpine resort, Thredbo. It’s no wonder EVT has over 10,000 employees.

Rewriting the Playbook for Unprecedented Challenges
Hastings readily admits she is not a “lifer” in the cinema business, though credits the skills she developed through working in travel, hospitality, media, entertainment, and marketing as allowing her to bring different perspectives from diverse sectors into the industry, enabling her to have a fresh point of view on the business itself. As she has bounced from one senior manager role to another, leaping up the corporate ladder each time, Hastings attributes listening to being crucial to her success. “I love change. I love to be in highly competitive environments, and that listening enables you to solve problems faster,” she explained. “Because there’s always a way to do something a little better. I have a little motto, ‘better than yesterday every day.’ And that’s definitely our perspective on cinema.”

This ability to embrace change and a willingness to deviate from historic operations helped Hastings through one of the biggest challenges she has ever faced in her career; COVID. Even though EVT is a diversified business, when the global pandemic arrived in 2020, all of the company’s operating sectors were disrupted, reducing its revenue to zero. “There was no greater challenge than waking up knowing that you had been shut down entirely overnight, with an uncertainty about when or what opening would look like,” she recalled.

Ultimately, while Hastings would never want to relive a COVID scenario again, which led to the lowest revenue she’d ever experienced, she believes it was one of the best things that EVT could have gone through. “We literally had to get out a blank sheet of paper for every one of our divisions and go, ‘Okay, so as revenue gradually comes in, what’s a better than closed operating model? How do we operate a hotel on the lowest volume of business and still deliver on compliance, deliver for customers and perform?’ ” Hastings recalled. “So we literally rewrote the way we could, or were able, to do business for every single one of our divisions. It was like we were starting up in each of these sectors all over again, and we could rewrite the playbook, because you simply couldn’t just apply what you’d always done, because the volume of business wasn’t there to enable that to happen. As we reopened and business gradually normalized, we’re able to make more money, get higher customer sentiment, higher employee sentiment, on lower volumes, because we were brave enough to say ‘That may have been how it was done. But how are we gonna do it now?'”

It was with this new mindset, while coming out of COVID, that the company rebranded from Event Hospitality & Entertainment to EVT. It was one way to make sure that the company would retain everything it had learned and improved on across each of their businesses as they went into the future. “The purpose of that rebranding was we were going to keep enhancing, keep innovating, and be better than we were before, as a result of all the change that we had made and rebranding ourselves was part of that,” said Hastings.

Bringing A Global Perspective to the Cinema Industry
As if running a multi-billion public company doesn’t give Hastings enough to do, she is also the current Chairperson for the Global Cinema Federation (GCF) having taken over the role from Alejandro Ramirez Magaña, the CEO of Cinépolis in April of 2024. Sean Gamble, the CEO of Cinemark is currently Vice Chairperson and will be taking over for Hastings in what is a rotating leadership scheme. With the GCF consisting of cinema operators both large and small from all over the world, it would be easy to assume there would be a lot of conflicting priorities within the trade group. But according to Hastings, “There’s actually more commonalities than you think when you boil it down to customers, employees, and content, thinking about the larger pieces. But what we’re really focused on at the moment is a more global understanding of moviegoer, customers and preference.”

“That’s really important to us, that we brought in the global understanding of what’s important to moviegoers, and to really feed that information and educate the broader film ecosystem,” she added. “The 12 members on the board have very large databases and are in direct contact with consumers. And so for the first time we’ve done some GCF research, surveying over 96,000 moviegoers across 14 markets so that we can derive global insights by market and share that with the film community, because sharing data to give everyone a more global view supports the health of the entire ecosystem.”

Given the perennial dire forecasts about the cinema business proffered by mainstream media the world over, Hastings thinks the narrative about the industry often gets distorted and that the GCF can play a role in helping provide a more informed reality. “If there’s any key industry questions that people really want to ask, then why wouldn’t we be the source for the answers, to initiate that and to feed that back, given that we have access to the world of customers?” she said.

One way the GCF wishes to achieve its goals is through better educating the public and its own members on cinema innovation taking place globally. “There are so many amazing cinema experiences now. There are all these choices customers have for how to watch a movie, but I think there’s a perception that a recliner in every cinema is as good as it gets and is the most amazing innovation. Well, that was kind of five years ago,” Hastings argued. “What’s important is that customers want choice, and they can have choice. If you want to sit in a traditional cinema seat, with your box of popcorn, great, there’s an option for you. But if you’re wanting the ultimate night out in a lounge with the big screen, the VIP service, the food and beverage, there’s plenty of options for you as well. It’s evolving, and we really want to educate everyone on the innovation taking place in cinemas.”

A Focus on Customers, Curiosity and Innovation
This global viewpoint, Hastings feels, has been one of the biggest changes coming out of COVID. With the pandemic and work stoppages causing a reduced number of new film releases, exhibitors have been forced to find alternative sources of movies and content. In doing this EVT, as well as many other circuits, have learned a lot about what movies work in each of their theatre locations.

“Some of our locations are probably more dependent on a Bollywood supply or an Asian cinema supply, than they are with Hollywood movies,” Hastings admitted. “We’ll have different parts of our circuit that will do really well with foreign language films from Europe. Customers are more global and, where we operate, communities are far more diverse, and so we’re looking across more channels for different content to suit that. Now you have to really know who your customer base is around every single location. There is no longer a world where you just set a program across your entire circuit and see what happens.”

In fact, the advice Hastings has for anyone wishing to follow in her footsteps in the cinema industry is, “Really know who is in your community. Really understand what their entertainment preferences are. How do we become the best entertainment offer in this community based on the other options that they have? Be open minded and look at the entire world of cinema as your reference point, because there’s so many innovative things happening out there that you can bring into the business. So just be customer focused, be curious and innovate. I think that more people coming into the industry with that level of global perspective, curiosity, innovation and connection to customers are going to deliver great entertainment outcomes.”