There are worse places to spend the last week of August than inside an air-conditioned convention center in Allen, Texas. Outside, temperatures topped 100°F (38°C) well into the evening. Inside, more than 60 cinema operators and 120 vendors and manufacturers gathered for this year’s CinéShow. North…

Last week’s Marquee was a bit of an editorial experiment. For the first time in 19 years, we used what could fairly be called a clickbait headline. Playing off a joke made by Regal CEO Eduardo Acuña while being honored at the Variety Boys & Girls Club of Boyle Heights sponsorship gala, we put hi…

Before anyone interprets this week’s headline as my editorial assessment of Regal Global Entertainment CEO Eduardo Acuña publicly backing the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, let me be clear: those are Acuña’s words, not mine. Acuña came out in support of the deal just one week befo…

We have finally finished publishing Celluloid Junkie’s coverage from CineEurope and the ICTA sessions in Barcelona, along with Andreas Fuchs’ report from IND/EX. One might therefore assume that the global cinema industry would take a short break from airports, hotel ballrooms, convention centers and…

Moviegoing Is The New Black First, thank you to everyone who reached out after last week’s Marquee to say how much you enjoyed it. I never would have guessed that so many people would appreciate a story about my daughters researching the optimal bathroom-break moment during Christopher Nolan’s nearl…

There are certain unavoidable realities one faces as the editor of a cinema industry trade publication. One is that multibillion-dollar studio mergers never stop generating news long enough for you to finish the newsletter. Another is that every potential sponsor will eventually explain that the mar…

There are weeks when putting together the CJ Marquee is mostly a matter of deciding which stories deserve space. This week became an exercise in waiting for the Paramount Skydance–Warner Bros. Discovery merger to stop producing news long enough for me to press Send. It did not cooperate. Every time…

The bad news about publishing a weekly industry newsletter is that inevitably you’re going to get a few things wrong. The good news is that, in the cinema business, you rarely have to wait long for the opportunity to apologize in person. Such was the case when, in last week’s Marquee, I identified U…

After a longer-than-planned absence, the CJ Marquee is back in your inbox. The cinema business, inconveniently, did not pause while we rebuilt our newsletter machinery behind the scenes. Exhibition and distribution kept consolidating, premium formats kept multiplying, release windows kept shifting,…

This was hardly what we planned for our first Marquee newsletter of the year. As we closed out 2024 with a global theatrical box that wasn’t nearly as bad as originally forecast, with full-year results estimated to be USD $30.5 billion, and industry analysts predicting an 8% uptick in 2025, we…