Celluloid Junkie’s 2026 Top Women in Global Cinema is proudly sponsored by Barco, Lionsgate and Qube Cinema.
Barco continues to give audiences new reasons to experience films on the big screen through HDR by Barco, bringing greater contrast, richer colour and exceptional detail to cinema presentation. Upcoming HDR releases include Disney’s “Hexed,” offering another opportunity to see what the technology can bring to the theatrical experience.
Lionsgate has already given exhibitors plenty to celebrate this year with the smash-hit Michael Jackson biopic “Michael,” and is preparing to return audiences to Panem with “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping,” opening in North America on 20 November.
Qube Cinema, celebrating its 40th year of developing technology for exhibitors and distributors, continues to expand its global reach. Its recent acquisition of Arts Alliance Media adds to that work, alongside the continued growth of Qube Wire, which delivered more than 50 different titles per week to cinemas across 96 countries in 2025.
We are grateful to all three sponsors for helping us celebrate the women whose work keeps this industry moving forward.
Yes, we know. This year’s Top Women in Global Cinema has had a longer run-up to release than we intended. Thank you for your patience. The 2026 edition recognises achievements during 2025, though the biographies also reflect subsequent developments in our honorees’ roles and careers.
For our tenth edition, we wanted to make sure the word “global” earned its place in the title. We took additional time to seek out candidates across different territories and parts of the cinema business, including women whose achievements may be better known in their own markets than on the international conference circuit. The resulting list reflects the breadth of talent helping shape cinema around the world.
Then came the small matter of fitting everyone into 50 places.
Needless to say, we cheated. A little. There are doubles, a few triples, and 62 women in our 50 ranked entries. Faced with a number of exhibitors who have a lineup of all-star senior executives, it became increasingly clear that even with those extra places, many deserving nominees do not appear here.
In making our selections, we considered both individual achievements and the breadth of markets, companies and roles represented. No list can ever capture all the women making an important contribution to cinema, and any omission should not be mistaken for a judgment on the value of someone’s work.
There is a serious point behind the arithmetic. Cinema is a collaborative business, and exceptional leadership does not always arrive one person at a time. Shared entries allow us to recognise colleagues whose individual achievements also tell a larger story about the organisations they are helping to build.
Across this year’s list are women running cinema circuits, strengthening independent exhibition, developing technology, winning audiences and guiding teams through a business that rarely stands still. Some are familiar names; others deserve to be far more widely known. Each has given us a reason to pay attention.
Thank you to everyone who put forward nominations and helped bring these achievements to our attention. Most of all, congratulations to this year’s honorees. We may have kept you waiting, but your work deserves the spotlight.
Clare Binns
Creative Director, Picturehouse Cinemas Ltd
Clare Binns has been an usher, projectionist, programmer, distributor and cinema executive, but the through-line in her more than four-decade career is remarkably simple: putting interesting films in front of audiences and giving them a reason to watch them together.
In 2025, she remained closely involved in Picturehouse’s creative and distribution work, including the acquisition and release of “Pillion,” while taking part in the company’s inaugural Picturehouse Create event connecting filmmakers and other creative talent. In November, after years leading Picturehouse Cinemas and Picturehouse Entertainment as Managing Director, Binns transitioned into a part-time Creative Director role while remaining involved in film acquisitions across the group.
If that sounded as though Binns was entering a quieter chapter of her career, 2026 quickly suggested otherwise. In February, BAFTA presented Binns with its Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema Award, recognizing a career spent championing independent, international and emerging filmmakers and making cinemas themselves vital parts of their communities. Her influence on British exhibition ultimately rests on something harder to quantify than screens or market share: the audiences she has helped build for films they might not otherwise have discovered.
Jane Hastings
Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, EVT
Jane Hastings has made a habit of asking moviegoers what they actually want and then using the answers. During her year as Chair of the Global Cinema Federation, the organization completed two major global audience studies, including a 2025 survey of more than 68,000 moviegoers across 15 markets. The findings cut through some familiar industry assumptions: when audiences have a film they want to see, relatively little stands in the way of a cinema visit, though moviegoers continue to ask for more volume and variety on screen.
Hastings has applied much the same customer-led thinking at EVT, where the company’s “fewer and better” strategy focuses investment on stronger locations and premium experiences. In 2025, EVT signed its largest-ever Australian expansion agreement with IMAX, adding four new IMAX with Laser locations, while continuing to invest in formats, seating and upgraded cinemas across its markets. Hastings handed the GCF chairmanship to Cinemark CEO Sean Gamble at CinemaCon 2025 but remains on its Executive Committee, alongside her role as EVT’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, a position she has held since July 2017.
Wanda Gierhart
Chief Marketing and Content Officer, Cinemark
At Cinemark, Wanda Gierhart Fearing has to answer two important questions: what should be on the screen, and how do you convince audiences to show up for it? As Chief Marketing and Content Officer, she brings film programming and audience strategy together, giving her an unusually broad view of how one of the world’s largest exhibitors attracts and retains moviegoers.
That relationship with audiences was particularly visible in 2025. Cinemark launched “It’s Show Time!,” its first comprehensive brand campaign, focusing not simply on individual films but on the moviegoing experience itself. Meanwhile, Cinemark Movie Club grew to more than 1.45 million members and accounted for 30% of the company’s domestic admissions revenue for the year. Both reflect an approach that treats the customer relationship as something to cultivate between releases rather than restart with every new movie. Gierhart Fearing’s influence also extends beyond Cinemark: in October 2025, she was elected Vice-Chair of the Executive Board of Cinema United.
Nikkole Denson-Randolph
SVP, U.S. Chief Content Officer, AMC Theatres
If a movie is going to play on AMC’s screens in the United States, Nikkole Denson-Randolph is one of the people who has a say in how it gets there. In January 2025, AMC promoted her to Senior Vice President, U.S. Chief Content Officer, putting her in charge of the circuit’s U.S. film programming, content acquisition and movie strategy, as well as its relationships with studios and the creative community.
The promotion was the culmination of a career at AMC that began in 2009 with a focus on alternative and special content, well before concert films and other nontraditional programming became a regular part of the theatrical conversation. Since then, Denson-Randolph has helped launch AMC Independent and AMC Artisan Films and played a central role in the circuit’s high-profile distribution of the Taylor Swift and Beyoncé concert films. Her current responsibilities extend beyond what plays on screen to how much audiences pay to see it. In 2025, she contributed to AMC’s pricing strategy as the circuit introduced 50% Off Wednesdays for its AMC Stubs members.
Chen Zhixi
Chairwoman and President, Ruyi Film Entertainment (Wanda Cinema)
Chen Zhixi came to exhibition from the content side, and it shows. The former actor and blockbuster producer doesn’t appear particularly interested in treating a movie theatre as simply a place that sells tickets and popcorn. Since taking charge of Wanda Film in 2024, she has pushed a “Super Entertainment Space” strategy intended to turn its cinemas into broader entertainment destinations built around movies, intellectual property, retail, gaming and events.
That could sound like the sort of phrase created for a strategy PowerPoint deck, but Wanda spent 2025 making it fairly literal. The company expanded its use of IP merchandise and lobby retail, unveiled a new “1+2+5” strategic framework in June and deepened its relationship with IMAX, including plans to convert up to 27 premium auditoriums. By the end of 2025, Wanda operated 714 directly owned cinemas and 6,179 screens in China, generated RMB 7.678 billion in domestic box office and held a 14.7% market share. More importantly for a company coming off a difficult 2024, it returned to profitability in 2025.
Brigitte Maccioni
Chairwoman and CEO, UGC
Brigitte Maccioni has seen UGC from just about every side of the business. Before becoming the first woman to lead the company in 2021, she spent decades working across its production and distribution operations, giving her a perspective that stretches well beyond what happens once a film reaches the screen. Today, as Chairwoman and CEO, she leads one of France’s largest cinema groups as well as a company deeply involved in producing and distributing the films those cinemas show.
In 2025, UGC recorded more than 18.2 million admissions across its 48 cinemas and 510 screens in France, increasing its market share to 11.6%. Maccioni also continued pushing the circuit beyond the usual definition of exhibition. The first Prix Cinéma des Enseignants, created with MAIF, brought teachers into the conversation around cinema as an educational tool, while UGC’s partnership with France’s Assurance Maladie turned 30 cinemas into venues for a week of films and discussions about mental health. Both initiatives reflect a company increasingly using its screens to put cinema into wider cultural conversations.
Melissa Thomas
Chief Financial Officer, Cinemark
Some of the most consequential work at a cinema company never makes it anywhere near the screen. As Cinemark’s Chief Financial Officer, Melissa Thomas spent 2025 balancing the less glamorous but rather important business of paying down debt, funding theatre improvements and making sure all the numbers still worked when the credits rolled.
Cinemark ended the year with $3.1 billion in revenue, its highest total since the pandemic, while generating $177 million in free cash flow. Under Thomas’s financial leadership, the company fully extinguished its remaining COVID-related debt, invested $219 million in capital improvements across its global circuit and returned $315 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. Her responsibilities also extend beyond finance to Cinemark’s strategic sourcing and IT organizations, putting Thomas at the center of both the company’s balance sheet and many of the systems needed to run the business behind the scenes.
Laura Houlgatte
CEO, UNIC
Laura Houlgatte’s job requires her to speak fluent cinema and fluent Brussels (which we realize may not be an official language). As CEO of the International Union of Cinemas, she represents exhibitors and national associations across 39 European territories, making sure the interests of movie theatres are understood in policy discussions where copyright, territoriality, media regulation and cultural funding can have very real consequences for the people actually operating them.
That work took on added importance in 2025 as a new European Commission and Parliament settled in, with more than half of MEPs newly elected. At CineEurope, Houlgatte and then UNIC President Phil Clapp pushed for clear theatrical exclusivity, stronger release slates and marketing that tells audiences when films really are only in cinemas. Houlgatte also continued building the industry’s leadership pipeline: the ninth edition of UNIC’s Women’s Cinema Leadership Programme welcomed 14 new mentees from 12 countries, part of a network that had grown to 184 women from 114 companies by CineEurope.
Bobbie Bagby Ford
President and Chief Creative Officer, B&B Theatres
B&B Theatres may be a century-old family business, but Bobbie Bagby Ford’s job is making sure the brand doesn’t feel like one. As President and Chief Creative Officer, she leads the marketing, loyalty, special-events and community-facing side of the fifth-largest cinema circuit in the United States, shaping how B&B talks to audiences as the company moves further into premium formats and broader entertainment experiences.
That audience relationship remained central in 2025 as B&B used its Backstage Pass loyalty program for member pricing, ticket packs and promotions designed to give customers reasons to come back between major releases. Bagby Ford’s challenge is an unusual one: maintaining the personality of a family-owned exhibitor while marketing a circuit whose footprint and offerings increasingly resemble those of a much larger national chain.
Bridget Bagby
Co-owner, B&B Theatres
Bridget Bagby’s role at B&B Theatres is harder to fit neatly into a corporate org chart. A third-generation exhibitor and co-owner, she and husband Bob Bagby remain at the head of a family business whose roots stretch back more than a century and which has grown into the fifth-largest cinema circuit in the United States.
Cinema was a family business for Bridget long before it became one for her children. Today, Bobbie Bagby Ford, Brittanie Bagby Baker and Brock Bagby all serve as presidents of B&B, representing the fourth generation to work for the company. Bridget remains the link between those generations as B&B continues expanding beyond traditional multiplexes into premium auditoriums, restaurants and entertainment centers while holding onto the family identity that has defined the circuit since its earliest days.
Brittanie Bagby Baker
President and Chief Operating Officer, B&B Theatres
Someone still has to make all those increasingly complicated B&B Theatres actually run. That falls in large part to Brittanie Bagby Baker, the company’s President and Chief Operating Officer, who oversees daily operations across a circuit whose newer venues can include restaurants, bars, bowling, arcades and other attractions alongside the auditoriums.
That operational job kept getting more complex in 2025. B&B reopened its remodeled Warrensburg, Missouri cinema and ended the year announcing plans to take over and upgrade the Liberty Center theatre in Ohio, continuing the company’s post-pandemic expansion. Bagby Baker’s role is to translate that growth into the less visible work of staffing, resources, cross-functional coordination and consistent operations across the circuit. She began working in her family’s theatres as a teenager and is now part of the fourth generation running them.
Natasha Fernandes
Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President, IMAX
IMAX had the best box-office year in its history in 2025. This gave Natasha Fernandes the pleasant but still complicated task of making sure the company’s finances were positioned to take advantage of it. As Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President, Fernandes oversees the capital structure behind a global cinema technology business whose network now stretches across more than 90 countries and territories.
In 2025, Fernandes led IMAX’s $250 million convertible debt offering, securing a 0.75% interest rate and using the proceeds to retire substantially all of the company’s notes due in 2026. She also led the renewal and expansion of IMAX’s revolving credit facility, increasing available borrowing capacity from $300 million to $375 million. Those transactions came as IMAX generated record global box office and substantially higher operating cash flow, giving the company additional flexibility to invest in network growth and technology. Fernandes, who joined IMAX’s finance team in 2007 and became CFO in 2022, also joined the board of IMAX China as a non-executive director in April 2025.
Stephanie Mills
Managing Director, HOYTS Cinemas
Stephanie Mills spent 2025 with responsibility for just about everything involved in getting audiences into HOYTS cinemas. As Director of Sales, Marketing and Content, she oversaw movie programming, marketing, loyalty, sales and partnerships at a time when the circuit was expanding both its market share and its premium cinema offering.
During the year, HOYTS revived its relationship with IMAX after a six-year absence, ultimately opening four new IMAX with Laser locations, while also announcing its first ScreenX auditorium at Melbourne Central. By year-end, HOYTS accounted for roughly 28% of Australia’s cinema box office. Mills’ responsibilities put her at the intersection of what HOYTS showed, how it sold it and how audiences experienced it. In July 2026, the company promoted her to the newly created role of Managing Director, HOYTS Cinemas.
Suzie Welch
Managing Director, ODEON Cinemas UK & Ireland and Chief People Officer, ODEON Cinemas Group
Suzie Welch has two jobs at ODEON that might seem to pull in different directions. As Managing Director for the UK & Ireland, she is responsible for the commercial and operational performance of its largest regional business. As Chief People Officer for ODEON Cinemas Group, she is thinking about the thousands of people across Europe who actually have to make that business work. In practice, the two jobs have quite a lot to do with each other.
That connection shaped Welch’s work in 2025, with a focus on strengthening cinema operations, supporting venue teams and improving the guest journey. ODEON also opened its cinemas to schools and youth groups on its largest-ever scale for the Into Film Festival, helping introduce young audiences around the UK to the big-screen experience. Alongside her work at ODEON, Welch continued developing future industry leaders as a mentor in UNIC’s Women’s Cinema Leadership Programme.
Clara Cheo
CEO, Golden Village Multiplex
When a rival cinema chain leaves a market, an empty multiplex can sit dark for years or become an opportunity for a new operator. Under Clara Cheo, Golden Village chose the latter. Less than three months after Cathay Cineplexes ceased operations in Singapore in 2025, Golden Village opened a new location in its former Downtown East site in November 2025, giving the country’s largest exhibitor its 17th cinema.
The six-hall, 980-seat venue added another piece to a circuit Cheo has been steadily adapting to changing audience habits. That increasingly means finding uses for cinemas beyond the traditional movie schedule. In 2025, Golden Village said bookings for private hall rentals and special screenings had doubled compared with pre-pandemic levels, alongside continued programming of concerts, event cinema and other alternative content. For Cheo, maintaining Golden Village’s market position increasingly involves deciding not just which films audiences want to see, but what else they might come to a cinema to do.
Koh Mei Lee
CEO, Golden Screen Cinemas
Koh Mei Lee has spent years arguing that a cinema needs to be more than somewhere to watch a movie. In 2025, Golden Screen Cinemas made that idea fairly literal at GSC 1 Utama, reopening the Malaysian multiplex after a major overhaul designed to make it as much a social and entertainment destination as a place to catch the latest release.
The refreshed complex has 13 halls and 1,595 seats, but the more interesting part is the mix: new BIG and Prestige auditoriums, a family-oriented PlayPark and refurbished ScreenX and 4DX experiences. It is a concentrated version of the broader strategy Koh has pursued at GSC, combining mainstream cinema with premium formats, food and beverage, family entertainment and other reasons to stay longer than the running time of the movie, or what the industry likes to call dwell time. In other words, the goal is not just to sell the ticket, but to make more of the hours around it.
Christine Berg
Chair of the Board, HDF KINO e.V.
Christine Berg spent much of 2025 arguing that Germany’s film funding system needs to remember what happens after a movie gets made. As Chair of HDF KINO, she represents the country’s exhibitors in debates over cinema investment and film policy, pushing for support that helps films reach audiences as well as get through production.
Berg knows the funding machinery particularly well. Before joining HDF, she helped oversee Germany’s Federal Film Board and its funding portfolio, including the German Federal Film Fund. In 2025, HDF joined other exhibition and festival organizations in calling for a more audience-focused approach to German film support while continuing to press for federal investment in cinemas themselves. Berg also helped reshape one of the industry’s longstanding gatherings, moving HDF’s KINO congress from Baden-Baden to Hamburg and combining it with Filmtage Köln to create CineHamburg, which debuted in Hamburg in July 2026.
Kelley Bondelie
Chief Operations Officer, Alamo Drafthouse
Running an Alamo Drafthouse has always meant operating more than a movie theatre. There is the cinema, of course, but also a restaurant, bar, special events and the particular expectations of an audience that tends to have strong opinions about what makes an Alamo an Alamo. Kelley Bondelie handles that equation as Chief Operations Officer, with responsibility for nearly 30 company-owned locations and more than 2,500 teammates nationwide.
Bondelie’s first stretch in the role has coincided with considerable change at the circuit following its acquisition by Sony Pictures Entertainment. In 2025, Alamo continued its expansion with new locations in Mountain View and Santa Clara, California, while Bondelie focused internally on making operational change work for the people responsible for delivering it. She has introduced operations boards, monthly brainstorming groups and anonymous feedback channels intended to give venue teams a greater voice in company decisions. Leadership development is another priority: four of the five members of her current director team previously worked under Bondelie earlier in their careers. Before Alamo, she held operational roles at both Moviehouse and Cinépolis.
Racheal Wilson
Chief Operating Officer & Executive Vice President, Harkins Theatres
There aren’t many corners of Harkins Theatres that fall outside Racheal Wilson’s remit. As Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President, she is responsible for theatre operations, film programming, IT, construction, real estate and development, as well as human resources across one of the largest privately owned cinema circuits in the United States. It is a considerable portfolio, built over more than 35 years in exhibition and three decades with Harkins.
That breadth was particularly relevant in 2025 as Harkins continued expanding what it considers an entertainment venue. In July, the company debuted Harkins BackLot in North Phoenix, combining large-format sports viewing with a restaurant and bar, bowling, arcade games and other attractions. The concept brings together several disciplines within Wilson’s operational remit while taking the Harkins brand beyond traditional moviegoing. Outside the company, Wilson chairs Cinema United’s Conventions Committee and serves on the leadership committee of 50/50 Women on Boards.
Helena Eklund
Group Marketing & Innovations Director, ODEON Cinemas Group
Marketing a cinema chain in one country is complicated enough. Helena Eklund gets to do it across nine. As Group Marketing & Innovations Director for ODEON Cinemas Group, she brings together teams working across brands including ODEON, UCI, Cinesa, Filmstaden and Finnkino, looking for the ideas that can travel across Europe while recognizing that audiences and markets do not always behave the same way.
That balancing act remained at the center of Eklund’s work in 2025 as she led group marketing communications and development of ODEON’s guest proposition, with a focus on turning audience insight into attendance and revenue while still giving local teams room to adapt. Her work was also recognized outside cinema when she was named to the 2025 Women to Watch in Hospitality, Travel, Leisure and Retail Index for her leadership, commercial impact and mentoring. Eklund previously served as ODEON’s Commercial Director for Northern Europe and worked on the distribution side at Sony before moving into exhibition.
Carla Chavarria
SVP & Chief Human Resources Officer, AMC Theatres
Running human resources for 23,777 U.S. cinema employees spread across hundreds of theatres is not exactly a desk job. Carla Chavarria has responsibility for the people side of AMC Theatres, from recruiting and training to compensation, benefits, internal communications and the systems that tie a large, geographically dispersed workforce together.
Chavarria’s perspective on that workforce comes with some history: she joined AMC in 1988 as a theatre manager in Philadelphia. More recently, her team launched a new internal communications platform intended to better connect frontline theatre employees with company leadership, while AMC says its broader people strategy has contributed to record-high retention. In 2025, the company was recognized by Forbes as both a Best Large Employer and a Best Employer for Women, alongside workplace honors from Newsweek and TIME. Chavarria also serves on AMC’s Executive Committee, putting the concerns of the people running its theatres directly into the company’s senior leadership discussions.
Magdalena Lewicka
Management Board Member; Finance Director, Multikino S.A. (Vue International)
Magdalena Lewicka is a finance director whose job increasingly takes her well beyond Multikino’s balance sheet. As a Management Board Member and Finance Director, she helps shape the Polish exhibitor’s strategy across finance, property, legal affairs and major projects. But some of her most interesting work in 2025 concerned the economics of the wider Polish film industry.
Since September 2024, Lewicka has served as President of the Polish New Cinema Association, representing exhibitors in discussions with government, industry partners and European organizations including UNIC. In 2025, she was appointed to a national committee developing the Polish Film Institute’s 2026 operational priorities while continuing to contribute to an Institute panel responsible for financing decisions around film production and feature debuts. What this means in practice is that Lewicka spends part of her time managing the finances of one cinema company and another part helping shape the system in which the entire Polish film business operates.
Edna Epelbaum
CEO, CinEvital
Edna Epelbaum has managed to make running cinemas only one part of her job, and you’d think that would be hard enough. As CEO of CinEvital, she operates theatres in Biel/Bienne while her wider cinema businesses extend to Neuchâtel, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Delémont and Bern. At the same time, she has become one of the more persistent voices representing Swiss exhibition in industry, cultural and political circles.
This was particularly true in 2025. After 12 years as President of the Swiss Cinema Association, Epelbaum stepped down in November and immediately took on the interim co-presidency of ProCinema while the organization searched for a permanent successor. She also continued as programming director of the Festival du Film Français d’Helvétie, helping assemble a 2025 edition of roughly 50 films, and in December moderated a filmmaker discussion at ProCinema’s parliamentary cinema event in Bern before more than 250 attendees from politics, culture and the film industry. The interim ProCinema role ended in 2026, but Epelbaum remains on its board and continues as a Vice-President of UNIC.
Elizabeth Frank
Chief Executive Officer, RealD
Elizabeth Frank spent more than a decade deciding what should play on thousands of AMC screens around the world. In February 2025, she moved to the other side of the table, becoming CEO of RealD and taking on a different challenge: getting exhibitors and studios to put more 3D on those screens, and making sure audiences can actually find it when they do.
Her timing was fortuitous. Global 3D box office reached $2.5 billion in 2025, more than double the previous year, and even without the phenomenon of “Ne Zha 2,” the format grew faster than the overall theatrical market. Frank spent her first year at RealD trying to turn that renewed interest into something sustainable. The company created a new cinema and content partnerships position for the Americas, bringing former Warner Bros. executive Nicki Woods aboard to focus on availability, scheduling and promotion (dare we say a future entrant here), and ended the year partnering with CJ 4DPLEX to combine RealD 3D with ScreenX. Frank’s exhibitor background gives her a useful perspective on the problem: selling 3D is not simply about having the technology installed; somebody still has to program it, market it and convince audiences to put on a pair of glasses to watch it.
Carrie Trotter
SVP, Head of Marketing, AMC Theatres
Carrie Trotter spent most of 2025 working on how to keep moviegoers coming back to AMC. By November, AMC had decided to give her the rest of the marketing department too. After 15 years in the company’s marketing organization, Trotter was promoted from Vice President of Loyalty to Senior Vice President, Marketing, putting her in charge of AMC’s broader brand and customer strategy.
The promotion followed another year of growth for the loyalty business she had been running. AMC introduced its new Premiere GO! tier in January, and by year-end approximately 39 million households were enrolled across AMC Stubs, Premiere, Premiere GO! and A-List, with members accounting for roughly half of the circuit’s U.S. attendance. Trotter’s work on loyalty, digital ticketing and customer data helped turn those programs into something more useful than a collection of discounts: a direct line to tens of millions of moviegoers. Her new job is figuring out what to do with that relationship.
Cynthia Pierce
SVP, Design & Construction, Facilities, Sight & Sound, AMC Theatres
Cynthia Pierce has spent more than four decades at AMC, and these days much of her job comes down to a deceptively simple question: what should an AMC auditorium actually look, sound and feel like? As Senior Vice President of Design & Construction, Facilities, Sight & Sound, Pierce oversees the teams responsible for everything from renovations and projection to the premium formats AMC increasingly uses to differentiate the theatrical experience.
There was plenty to keep those teams occupied in 2025. AMC signed a major agreement with CJ 4DPLEX to bring 4DX and ScreenX to its U.S. circuit, expanded its commitments with IMAX and Dolby, and began rolling out XL at AMC, its designation for auditoriums with screens at least 40 feet wide and 4K laser projection. By year-end, 47 U.S. AMC theatres offered XL and nearly 3,000 U.S. auditoriums had been converted to Laser at AMC. Pierce, who began her AMC career as an hourly theatre manager in 1981, now helps decide what the next generation of those theatres will become.
Jennifer Douglass
SVP, U.S. Operations, AMC Theatres
Jennifer Douglass is responsible for what happens after the marketing works and the customer actually arrives at the theatre. As Senior Vice President of U.S. Operations, she oversees performance across more than 500 AMC locations and a field organization of more than 20,000 associates, along with Guest Experience and the food-and-beverage business.
These days, that last category involves considerably more than popcorn in a cardboard tub. Douglass’ organization includes AMC’s rapidly growing movie merchandise and collectibles business, where limited-edition popcorn vessels and other film-themed products have become both a revenue stream and part of the event around major releases. In 2025, “Wicked: For Good” set AMC’s merchandise record for the year during its opening weekend. Douglass also has responsibility for the much less Instagram-friendly parts of cinema operations: staffing, cleanliness, service, food quality and making sure hundreds of theatres are ready when millions of customers decide to show up at once. She joined AMC in 1987 and has spent nearly four decades learning exactly how complicated that can be.
Alex Holden
Group General Manager, Customer & Brand, EVT
Alex Holden has spent much of her career proving that a cinema loyalty program can be more useful than simply a way to collect points. As the architect of Cinebuzz, she helped turn EVT’s membership program into a substantial source of audience intelligence, giving the company a detailed view of how moviegoers actually behave rather than relying solely on what they say they might do.
That relationship was hard to miss in 2025, when Cinebuzz members accounted for 69% of cinema visits and 86% of online transactions in Australia, giving EVT an unusually direct connection with its customers. Holden has used that information to help shape EVT’s audience strategy, including its “Your Cinema Your Way” approach and development of customer propositions across the circuit. Her influence also extends beyond EVT: for three consecutive years she has contributed to the Global Cinema Federation’s international audience research programme. Since 2022, her role has expanded beyond cinemas to customer and brand strategy across EVT’s hotels, Thredbo resort and entertainment businesses.
Darryl Schaffer
Chief Partnership Officer, Screenvision Media
Cinema advertising only works if you have cinemas in which to sell the ads. Darryl Schaffer is responsible for making sure Screenvision Media has plenty of them. As Chief Partnership Officer, she oversees the company’s exhibitor relationships and the long-term contracts that hold together a national network spanning nearly 14,000 screens.
There was certainly plenty to keep her busy in 2025. Screenvision extended its 16-year relationship with Marcus Theatres, keeping 60 theatres and 806 screens in the network, while later renewals and additions involving CMX, Cinema West, Reading International and Screendollars helped push the company back to nearly 14,000 screens and, by Screenvision’s estimate, roughly 45% of the U.S. cinema advertising market by year-end. Schaffer has spent more than 25 years at Screenvision, long enough to know that a national cinema advertising network is ultimately built one exhibitor relationship at a time.
Katharina Phebey
Head of Marketing & Content, Member of the Board, Kinopolis Management Multiplex GmbH
Katharina Phebey’s responsibilities at Kinopolis stretch from deciding what audiences see to shaping how those films and cinemas are presented to them. As Head of Marketing & Content and a member of the Kinopolis Management Board, she oversees the company’s marketing activities as well as film acquisition and programming across 18 locations.
Those responsibilities came together rather visibly in 2025 with the opening of Kinopolis HafenCity in Hamburg. The 10-screen, roughly 2,200-seat complex became the city’s largest cinema, and Phebey played a major role in positioning the new venue as Kinopolis expanded its premium offering and presence in northern Germany. The project received some additional validation in 2026 when ICTA named HafenCity the Best New Build Cinema in EMEA. Outside Kinopolis, Phebey also contributes to industry work through the German Federal Film Board and UNIC’s People Programme.
Niharika Bijli
Lead Strategist, PVR INOX
Niharika Bijli has helped turn old movies into new business for PVR INOX. What began as a way of filling gaps between major releases has developed into a regular programming category, with restored classics, cult favorites and relatively recent films returning to theatres for audiences that either want to see them again or never saw them on a big screen in the first place.
The strategy gained considerable momentum in 2025. PVR INOX re-released roughly 200 films across multiple languages during the year, while results for the financial year ended March 2025 showed 7.1 million admissions and INR ₹124 crore (USD $13.14 million) in box office from re-releases. Bijli, PVR INOX’s Lead Strategist, has been one of the executives shaping that approach, using audience demand, pricing and carefully limited screen counts to determine which titles can find a second theatrical life.
Narinder Shergill
General Manager, UK & Ireland, Vue International
In May 2025, after nearly a decade in senior finance roles at Vue International, Narinder Shergill was given responsibility for pretty much everything that produces the numbers she had spent years analyzing. As General Manager for the UK & Ireland, she now oversees one of Vue’s largest territories.
Her first months in the job coincided with a substantial round of investment. Vue reopened the former Cineworld at Nottingham’s Cornerhouse, introduced its new EPIC by Vue premium format there and continued upgrading auditoriums with laser projection and enhanced seating. Shergill’s territory also expanded Vue Your Way, a self-service approach to cinema food and beverage, alongside a wider focus on customer experience and retail performance. It is a considerable change in perspective for an executive who joined Vue in financial planning in 2016: Shergill is no longer simply helping determine where the company should invest its money, but overseeing what happens after it does.
Bernadette McCabe
Vice President, Exhibitor Relations, NCM & Spotlight Cinema Networks
Bernadette McCabe spent 2025 building Spotlight Cinema Networks’ exhibitor relationships so effectively that, by November, the company itself had become part of something considerably larger. National CineMedia acquired Spotlight late in the year, adding its network of art-house, luxury and dine-in cinemas to the largest cinema advertising platform in the United States.
Before the acquisition, McCabe served as Spotlight’s Executive Vice President of Event Cinema and Exhibitor Relations, growing its exhibitor network by more than 20% over her tenure while also overseeing content acquisition, programming and operations for CineLife Entertainment. The combination ultimately expanded McCabe’s own responsibilities as well: in May 2026, NCM promoted her to Vice President of Exhibitor Relations for both NCM and Spotlight, putting her at the center of relationships across the combined network. Her career has now taken her through Screenvision, MoviePass, Spotlight and NCM, giving her an unusually broad view of what exhibitors want from the companies asking for access to their screens.
Gurbani Marwah
VP Theatrical Releasing & Film Buying, Cineplex
Gurbani Marwah puts her film-buying philosophy rather simply: every film has an audience. At Cineplex in Canada, her job is figuring out where that audience is, how large it might be and how best to put the two together. As Vice President of Theatrical Releasing & Film Buying, she manages studio relationships in Canada and the United States while overseeing film buying, programming, release strategy, festivals, premieres and national film promotion.
Marwah’s profile within both Cineplex and the wider Canadian industry continued to grow in 2025. She moved into the Vice President role during the year and was selected by Cinema United for its Behind the Screens series highlighting people shaping exhibition. In October, the Canadian Picture Pioneers presented her with a Silver Spotlight Award recognizing her contributions to the Canadian film industry. Marwah also serves on several industry and cultural boards, extending that audience-building work beyond the films playing in Cineplex theatres.
Cara West
VP of Film and Content Strategy, Cinemark
Not everything playing on a Cinemark screen these days comes from a traditional Hollywood release, and Cara West has helped make that an increasingly wise programming decision. As Vice President of Film and Content Strategy, she leads the company’s Special Initiatives team, programming everything from anime and faith-based films to creator content and one-off cultural events.
In 2025, that programming generated an all-time high 13% of Cinemark’s global box office, marking the third consecutive year that nontraditional content represented more than 10% of the company’s results. The slate included “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle,” which became Cinemark’s biggest anime film ever, along with special programming such as Taylor Swift’s “Official Release Party of a Showgirl.” West has spent more than 15 years on Cinemark’s film team, increasingly focused on finding audiences for content that doesn’t necessarily arrive through the industry’s usual release pipeline.
María Dolores León
Marketing Manager (CMO), Multicines Ecuador
María Dolores León had a fairly straightforward marketing assignment at Multicines Ecuador in 2025: win more of the market, move more customers to purchase tickets online and give them reasons to come back. By the company’s own figures, she and her team made progress on all three.
Multicines says its national market share increased from 42% in January to 46.4% by December, while the share of tickets sold through digital channels climbed from 39.6% in 2024 to 46.5% in 2025. Its loyalty program, which León leads, grew membership by 13% and now accounts for roughly 45% of company revenue. The year also brought continued expansion, including a new entertainment complex in Machala combining eight cinema screens with bowling, arcade attractions and food and beverage. León has spent nearly nine years with Multicines, increasingly focused on making customer behavior as important to the business as the films themselves.
Dee Vassili
Chief People Officer, Vue International
As Chief People Officer for one of Europe’s largest exhibitors, Dee Vassili spent 2025 reshaping the organization behind initiatives such as Vue Your Way, the company’s self-service cinema model, while helping move Vue toward a more centralized structure across its European businesses. Her team also introduced a new recruitment platform and expanded automation across onboarding, leave management and other everyday HR processes, while developing a longer-term roadmap for people technology. The objective is not simply to replace paperwork with software, but to change how a large international cinema company recruits, organizes and supports its workforce. Vassili also chairs UNIC’s People Programme Advisory Board, where many of those same questions are being tackled across the wider European exhibition sector.
Laura Najlis
Vice President of Marketing and Revenue Growth, Latin America, Cinemark
Marketing cinemas across Latin America means dealing with markets that share a region but not necessarily the same moviegoing habits or, in certain instances, even the same language. As Vice President of Marketing and Revenue Growth, Laura Najlis guides Cinemark’s audience strategy across those markets, using customer data, loyalty programs and digital platforms to turn those differences into growth opportunities.
In 2025, that included pushing Cinemark Argentina’s digital and loyalty strategy forward through a new partnership with Monks designed to connect data, creativity, Cine Fan and emerging AI tools more closely. It is a logical extension of work Najlis has pursued for years: using digital platforms not simply to sell tickets, but to understand audiences well enough to persuade them to come back.
Roberta Correa
International VP of Food and Beverage, Cinemark
Roberta Correa has the rather complicated task of deciding what moviegoers across 13 Latin American countries might want to eat and drink, and then figuring out how Cinemark can actually serve it to them. As International Vice President of Food & Beverage, she helps shape concessions across more than 190 theatres while balancing local tastes, operational efficiency, pricing and supplier relationships.
After more than 20 years at Cinemark, Correa continues to evolve a business that now extends well beyond the traditional concession counter. Mobile ordering is available across most of Cinemark’s Latin American circuit, while premium locations increasingly add bars, lounges and expanded menus. For Correa, the popcorn may still be important, but it is no longer the whole food-and-beverage story.
Eva M. Valles
Operations Director and interim People Director – Southern Europe, ODEON Cinemas Group
As Operations Director for Southern Europe at ODEON Cinemas Group, Eva M. Valles leads more than 2,500 colleagues across 99 cinemas in four countries, with training and engagement programs aimed at improving guest satisfaction across the region.
That combination of operational discipline and people development earned Valles a place in the 2025 Women to Watch in Hospitality, Travel, Leisure and Retail Index. More recently, ODEON has also asked her to serve as interim People Director for Southern Europe, bringing the people and operational sides of her experience even closer together.
Rebecca Parr-Phillips
Operations Director – UK & I, ODEON Cinemas Group
Rebecca Parr-Phillips oversees the day-to-day operation of 114 ODEON cinemas across the UK and Ireland, but one of her more interesting projects in 2025 involved making those cinemas easier for more people to use. In September, ODEON announced a trial of WatchWord smart captioning glasses at 14 UK locations, beginning with “Wicked: For Good,” with Parr-Phillips helping front the initiative for the exhibitor.
The technology gives Deaf and hard-of-hearing moviegoers line-of-sight closed captions without restricting them to particular open-captioned screenings. For Parr-Phillips, the initial rollout was deliberately practical: get the booking process and device availability right at 14 cinemas, learn from the trial and build from there.
Mojisola Oladapo
Chief Marketing Officer, Filmhouse Group
Mojisola Oladapo has one of those job titles that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. As Chief Marketing Officer of Nigeria’s Filmhouse Group, her work certainly involves getting audiences excited about movies, but increasingly it also means thinking like an operator: which audiences a film can reach, how to reach them and how marketing can translate into sustainable business.
That thinking can be seen in Filmhouse’s approach to Nollywood, where Oladapo has helped build campaigns around targeted release timing, talent meet-and-greets and other event-style promotions, while looking beyond Nigeria to diaspora audiences in markets including the UK, U.S. and Canada. Her broader role since 2025 has increasingly connected marketing with commercial strategy across Filmhouse’s cinema, distribution and production businesses. Oladapo brings more than 16 years of experience across financial services, consulting, technology and entertainment, including a decade running her own advisory firm before joining Filmhouse.
Annie Wang
President, GDC Technology America
When GDC Technology celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2025, Annie Wang had already spent 18 of those years building the company’s business in the Americas. As President of GDC Technology America, she leads an operation spanning sales, marketing, logistics, technical support and customer service across North and Latin America, where GDC technology is installed on more than 13,000 screens. In 2025, that required steering the regional business as GDC continued expanding beyond the digital cinema servers on which it built its reputation into LED media servers, immersive audio and cinema-management technology. Wang joined GDC in 2007 and was named President in 2022, giving her a front-row view of how cinema technology has evolved from digital conversion into a much broader presentation and operations business.
Claire Ripsteen
SVP, Marketing and Partnerships, Fandango
Buying a movie ticket used to be a fairly straightforward transaction, but Claire Ripsteen is helping Fandango turn it into the beginning of a larger fan experience. As Senior Vice President of Marketing and Partnerships, she oversees marketing, partnerships, rewards, eCommerce and gift cards across Fandango, Fandango at Home and Rotten Tomatoes.
In 2025, Ripsteen helped expand Fandango’s use of early-access screenings, ticket-and-merchandise bundles and other fan-focused promotions around releases including “Superman,” “How to Train Your Dragon,” “Lilo & Stitch” and “Wicked: For Good.” The idea is simple enough: give moviegoers another reason to buy early, while turning the ticket purchase itself into part of the event.
Cynthia Rodriguez
VP, Film Rental & Forecasting, Regal
Not many executives negotiating film rental terms for one of America’s largest cinema circuits began as theatre staff, managed a theatre and later ran operations for a nonprofit cinema. Cynthia “Cyndi” Rodriguez has done all of that during a 35-year career that has given her an unusually ground-level understanding of how exhibition works.
As Vice President of Film Rental & Forecasting at Regal, Rodriguez leads the studio negotiations and box office forecasting that help determine the economics behind what plays across the circuit. Before joining Regal nearly nine years ago, she worked in film analysis at both Loews and Cinemark, with a stint running a nonprofit cinema in Stamford, Connecticut, in between.
Chaya Rosenthal
Chief Marketing Officer, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
Marketing a movie at Alamo Drafthouse can apparently require custom slime for “Dog Man,” putting “Jaws” back on the water or any number of things that don’t normally appear in a media plan. As Chief Marketing Officer, Chaya Rosenthal helps turn that kind of theatrical showmanship into a reason for audiences to leave home and make a night of going to the movies.
In 2025, that included Alamo’s multiyear partnership with Toho, launched alongside a Godzilla-themed auditorium at the new Valley Fair cinema and expanded nationally through special screenings and exclusive merchandise. Rosenthal also helped represent the company’s Rolling Roadshow revival around “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale,” which turned a Beverly Hills estate into an elaborate opening-night cinema event. At Alamo, it seems the marketing department occasionally needs as many props as it does advertising plans.
Anne-Sophie Le Guiader
Country Manager Box Office, Sales & Marketing, Kinepolis
Anne-Sophie Le Guiader spent 2025 helping Kinepolis France make cinema both more premium and more accessible. As Country Manager Box Office, Sales & Marketing, she helps shape the commercial strategy for an 18-cinema circuit while adapting ideas from Kinepolis’ other territories to the particular habits of French audiences.
In March 2025, Kinepolis signed an agreement to make the GRETA accessibility solution available across 200 auditoriums in France, with Le Guiader representing the exhibitor on the initiative. Later in the year, the circuit continued testing premium concepts including Lounge Beds at selected cinemas. Le Guiader’s own explanation of the strategy is refreshingly unformulaic: what works in one market still has to prove that it works in another.
Lela Meadow-Conner
Executive Director, Art House Convergence
Independent cinemas spend a lot of time asking how to get deserving films onto screens and audiences into seats. Lela Meadow-Conner spent 2025 working on both problems. As President of Art House Convergence during the year, she helped lead an organization whose Art House Theater Day brought shared programming to 103 cinemas, with filmmakers Sean Baker and Samantha Quan serving as ambassadors.
Meanwhile, The Popcorn List, which Meadow-Conner co-founded in 2024, moved from recommending undistributed festival films to actually showing them. Its inaugural Pop Up Series brought three films to independent cinemas in 10 U.S. cities during September, with another five available virtually. Meadow-Conner has since become Executive Director of Art House Convergence, giving her an even larger platform from which to keep asking how independent films and independent cinemas can help one another.
Sari Peltonen
CEO, Savon Kinot Oy
Most days, Savon Kinot’s Joensuu cinema is one of six cinemas Sari Peltonen oversees across five cities in Eastern Finland. Once a year, it also becomes a meeting place for much of the country’s cinema industry.
In August 2025, Savon Kinot hosted CINEMA 2025 in Joensuu, a three-day gathering that drew more than 250 professionals from cinemas, distributors, production companies and industry organizations to discuss the business and preview upcoming films. Peltonen has worked at the family-owned company since 1988 and led it since 2009, giving an independent regional exhibitor an influence on Finland’s cinema industry that extends considerably beyond its own screens.
Amanda Martin
Senior Vice President, External Affairs, Cinema United
Amanda Martin spent 2025 working on both the people already running cinemas and some of those who may run them next. As Chief of Staff at Cinema United during the year, she managed the second season of “Behind the Screens: The Faces of Exhibition,” profiling theatre owners and operators from across the industry, while also leading the launch of Future Leaders in Cinema, a two-year development program combining education, mentorship and industry engagement.
Martin’s responsibilities have since grown considerably. In September 2026, Cinema United promoted her to Senior Vice President of External Affairs, adding broader industry partnerships and educational programming to an advocacy portfolio that already included federal and state government affairs.
Erin Von Hoetzendorff
Vice President, Membership and Global Affairs, Cinema United
Erin Von Hoetzendorff’s job requires keeping an increasingly international collection of cinema owners connected to one another and to the trade association representing them. In 2025, that took Cinema United’s membership and global-affairs lead from CineEurope in Barcelona to UNIC Cinema Days in Brussels, while she continued overseeing member communities and serving as liaison to the Global Cinema Federation.
Cinema United made that international role more explicit in September 2026, promoting Von Hoetzendorff to Vice President of Membership and Global Affairs. She also serves as Director of Education for Film Row, extending her industry work into professional development beyond Cinema United itself.
Paola Hernández Villalvazo
Global Director of Compliance and Sustainability, Cinépolis
Compliance is one of those parts of the cinema business audiences are unlikely to notice unless something goes incredibly wrong. At Cinépolis, Paola Hernández Villalvazo has the considerably larger task of making those standards work consistently across a company operating in numerous countries.
As Global Director of Compliance and Sustainability, Hernández helped develop the company’s new Global Code of Integrity while advancing governance and sustainability policies across the organization. In 2025, Cinépolis ranked first in the Leisure & Entertainment sector of Mexico’s Merco ESG ranking, reflecting work that extends well beyond what happens inside an auditorium.
Georgia Culverwell
Global Head of Marketing, Vista Group
Getting cinema software into the cloud is complicated enough; Georgia Culverwell spent 2025 figuring out how to explain to thousands of Vista customers what they were moving to, why and how to get there. As Head of Marketing, she helped turn Vista Cloud and the company’s increasingly broad product portfolio into something customers could navigate more easily. Her team helped introduce a public two-year Product Roadmap and launched Vista Vault, which shows clients products and features they may already be entitled to use. The work also contributed to Culverwell’s promotion to Global Head of Marketing after just 15 months leading the function.
Lauren Greene
Vice President, Strategic Services, Vista Group
Movie marketing produces no shortage of clicks, impressions and engagement statistics, so Lauren Greene and her team at Vista have been working on the considerably more useful question: did any of it actually get someone to go to the movies? Through Movio Research and Measurement, Greene has helped develop ways of combining aggregated, anonymized exhibitor attendance data with marketing activity to give studios and cinemas a clearer picture of campaign effectiveness. The work, which advanced through 2025 and into 2026, has involved exhibitors, studios including Warner Bros., Universal and Sony, and technology platforms such as Google and Amazon. As Vice President of Strategic Services, Greene is helping turn data cinemas already generate into information the wider theatrical business can actually use.
Tess Manchester
SVP, Platform & Client Support, Vista Group
Tess Manchester’s work tends to begin after cinema technology has been sold, installed and somebody needs it to keep working. As Senior Vice President of Platform & Client Support at Vista Group, she leads teams responsible for supporting cinema customers around the world. In 2025, Manchester focused on making those teams better at solving problems themselves: expanding internal learning and knowledge resources, developing the next generation of Vista specialists and continuing to integrate AI-assisted tools into support workflows. It is not the most visible part of cinema technology, but anyone who has ever had a critical operational system fail on a Friday night knows visibility is hardly the point.
Brittany Drennen Collins
National Sales Director, Cinema, Gaming and Indoor, PepsiCo Foodservice
Movie theatres have been selling fountain soda for about as long as anyone can remember; Brittany Drennen Collins spent 2025 helping make it considerably less predictable. As PepsiCo Foodservice’s National Sales Director for Cinema, Gaming and Indoor, she manages national accounts including Regal and Marcus Theatres while helping shape the company’s cinema-channel strategy. Her work included the expansion of DRIPS by Pepsi at Regal, where traditional soft drinks suddenly found themselves sharing a cup with boba, cold foam and even floating cotton candy. Collins has spent 15 years at PepsiCo, bringing experience from both its food and beverage businesses to a part of exhibition where audiences are increasingly expecting more than the usual selection of fountain sodas.
Maricarmen Figueroa
Global Exhibition Marketing and Distributors Relations Manager, Cinépolis
Maricarmen Figueroa’s job can mean adapting a major studio campaign across 18 Cinépolis territories one week and helping stage Sundance in Mexico City the next. As Global Exhibition Marketing and Distributors Relations Manager, she coordinates film initiatives with the major studios while also overseeing programs including Garantía Cinépolis, Sala de Arte and the exhibitor’s relationships with film festivals. In 2025, Figueroa shared general-production credit for the second Sundance Film Festival: CDMX, which brought 15 feature films, five shorts and filmmaker events to four Cinépolis venues. It is a role that puts her somewhere between film marketer, distributor liaison and festival producer, depending on what happens to be opening that week.
Natálie Mulinowá
Retail Director CEE & IL, Regal Global Entertainment
Natálie Mulinowá has spent her Cinema City career moving from the cinema floor to film programming and then to the concession counter; by now that counter stretches across seven countries. After joining Cinema City in Prague as an usher in 2008, she spent five years in film programming before moving into food and beverage. In October 2025, Mulinowá was promoted to Director of Retail for Central and Eastern Europe and Israel, giving her responsibility for retail strategy across 114 Cinema City, Rav Hen and Planet cinemas. Her brief covers everything from product range and pricing to hospitality, service and foyer presentation. In 2026, that work received some additional recognition when Mulinowá was presented with a CineEurope Gold Award.
Traci Hanlon
CMO, Cinergy Entertainment
At Cinergy Entertainment, the marketing department has to sell considerably more than movies. Traci Hanlon has spent nearly a decade figuring out how to keep guests moving between cinemas, video games, attractions and food… and, more importantly, coming back. Her work included building Cinergy’s loyalty platform to nearly 300,000 members and launching a paid membership program combining movie tickets with gaming and attraction benefits. The industry has apparently decided she should explain how she does it, too, with Hanlon appearing on panels at SXSW, the Dine-In Cinema Summit and Cinema United’s Fall Summit in 2025. In November, Cinergy promoted Hanlon to Chief Marketing Officer, putting her in charge of marketing, sales and guest engagement across the company’s cinema and entertainment centers.
Megumi Inoue
Executive Officer; Director of Theater Marketing, Theater Business Division, Toei Joy Entertainment
At T-Joy, marketing a movie can involve considerably more than advertising it. The exhibitor routinely turns releases into themed drinks, collectible popcorn containers, cafés, merchandise and other reasons to spend a little more time at the cinema, and Megumi Inoue leads the department responsible for that work. In June 2025, T-Joy appointed Inoue an Executive Officer while she continued as Director of Theater Marketing within its Theater Business Division, giving her a senior management role at a circuit spanning 23 cinemas and 230 screens. The company has since changed its corporate name to Toei Joy Entertainment, but its cinemas continue to operate under the familiar T-Joy and related brands.
Cinthia Anastassia Surbakti
Director of Operations, Cinépolis Cinemas Indonesia
Before becoming Director of Operations for Cinépolis Indonesia, Cinthia Anastassia Surbakti spent more than a decade learning the business one cinema job at a time, progressing through supervisory and management roles before becoming a Regional Manager in 2022. In 2025, the region she led posted strong results in Cinépolis’ International Audit, including scores of 90.9 and 100 at two of its busiest cinemas in Medan and Binjai. By January 2026, Cinépolis had promoted Surbakti to Director of Operations for Indonesia, giving her responsibility for taking the operational discipline she developed across one region and applying it nationwide.
Angela Smetana
Director of Media, Marcus Theatres
Most cinema marketers don’t get to turn their CEO into a recurring social-media character. Angela Smetana does. As Director of Media at Marcus Theatres, she leads social media, paid media, public relations and partnerships, and has helped make CEO Greg Marcus a familiar face well beyond his appearances before movies in Marcus auditoriums. In 2025, her team’s “Freakier Friday” merchandise video reached 25 million views on TikTok, more than 2 million on Instagram and more than 1 million on Facebook. For Smetana, it seems movie marketing increasingly means figuring out how a theatre company can become part of the entertainment rather than simply advertise it.
- CJ’s Top Women In Global Cinema – 2026 - October 29, 2026
- Cinema Collectibles Are Big Business, but Knowing What to Order Requires Strategy - October 15, 2026
- Cinema Owners Have Invested $2.7 Billion in Theatres. What Is That Money Buying? - October 1, 2026