In hindsight, NATO was an unnecessarily confusing acronym for a trade organization representing movie theater owners. For 60 years, the National Association of Theatre Owners has promoted interests of movie theaters, from the biggest chains to the one screen mom and pop shops. They've also regularly gotten mail and phone calls intended for the other NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
But the theater owner’s organization is looking to the future, with a new name and a refocused mission. The group will now be known as Cinema United, president and CEO Michael O’Leary told The Associated Press Tuesday.
“It can be a little complicated having the same name as a multinational military alliance,” O’Leary said. “We felt that it was time to look at our name and do a rebrand.”
They wanted the new name to reflect the “passion and energy of the people that run theaters,” O’Leary said, and to put the focus back on the exhibitors and movie theaters. Cinema United represents more than 32,000 movie screens in the U.S. and more than 30,000 screens in 88 countries. Their job, O’Leary explained, is to promote and support theatrical exhibition. Moviegoing, the new tagline reads, is their mission.
“We’ve had a challenging four or five years. But with each passing day, we put those challenges in the rearview mirror a little bit more. Our focus right now is on the future,” O’Leary said. “I think that we stand on the precipice of the next great era of cinema.”
An Oscars rallying cry for moviegoing
Just a few weeks ago, "Anora" filmmaker Sean Baker made his own case for theaters on the national stage. In accepting his best director Oscar, he used his time at the podium to make a "battle cry" for the theatrical experience – for filmmakers to keep making movies for the big screen and for studios to keep releasing them there.
“People were ecstatic about it,” O’Leary said. “He has earned the unyielding allegiance of theater owners all around the world for his strong support over the years, and certainly at the Oscars.”
Movie theaters big and small were hit hard by the pandemic – many closed and never re-opened. Last year, they also faced a depleted release calendar due to the Hollywood strikes. It’s all resulted in a depleted domestic box office that has yet to reach pre-pandemic levels. In 2024, the industry finished just over $8.7 billion, down 3.3% from 2023 and 23.5% from 2019.
A fuller release schedule is expected this year, but currently the box-office total is down about 5% from where the industry was last year at this time.
“It’s really important that we not put too much emphasis on a single year like 2025. We need to constantly be building and growing and moving forward,” O’Leary said.
Despite challenges, it remains an all-ages and affordable entertainment pasttime. A recent study from the National Research Group said 76% of the American population ages 12 to 74 attended at least one movie in 2024.
Highlighting movie theater upgrades
And though theater closures often make headlines, like the E Street Cinema in Washington D.C., where Cinema United is headquartered, there’s also been a spate of investment and refurbishment in theaters around the country, some spearheaded by famous filmmakers and actors.
Jason Reitman along with more than 30 directors including Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan and Bradley Cooper last February acquired Westwood's Village Theater in Los Angeles, which dates back to 1931. Patrick Wilson also purchased and helped restore an historic theater in New Canaan, CT, joining big screen disciples like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino who have all invested in movie theaters.
Last fall, the eight biggest theater chains in the U.S. and Canada announced that they planned to invest more than $2.2 billion to modernize 21,000 movie theater screens over the next three years. This includes anything from projectors, lighting and sound to features in the concessions area. But upgrades in theaters are nothing new, O’Leary said, they’re just helping to draw attention to it.
“The entire membership reinvests in their theaters on a regular basis,” O’Leary said. “Part of the reason we made that announcement was because I don’t think it’s obvious to people that theater owners are constantly in the process of reinventing themselves and reinvesting.”
Gearing up for 2025's summer movie season
The announcement comes just over a week before some 6,000 movie theater employees from around the world convene in Las Vegas for the annual CinemaCon conference, which Cinema United hosts.
All the major Hollywood studios, including The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros. Pictures, Universal Pictures and even Amazon/MGM will be making big, starry presentations on the main stage at Caesar's Palace — where executives and stars will show off new footage and trailers to make the case that they have the goods to get audiences in the theaters.
Showcasing that many theaters are small businesses
NATO was coined in 1965, a merger of the nation’s largest movie theater trade organizations: The Theater Owners of America, itself a product of a merger dating back to 1948, and the Allied States Association of Motion Picture Exhibitors, which goes back to the 1920s.
Those at Cinema United like to say that "we’re not a Hollywood industry. We’re a Main Street industry.”
“At the end of the day, the vast majority of our members are small businesses, so they feel the same pushes and pulls that other small businesses feel throughout the United States and around the world, O’Leary said. “The headquarters of our biggest members are not in Los Angeles or New York. They’re in Knoxville, Dallas and Kansas."
Credit: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Credit: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
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