Movie Theaters Want More People in Their Seats. Can Good Design Help? | 100 People With Ideas

Standing out through design may be becoming one way cinema chains remake their brands.

At the end of last year, Baimeihui Cinema opened at Kerry Centre in Hangzhou, and with it came the news that LUXE's brand-new giant screen had officially arrived in the city.

If you have been to this theater, you will have noticed that beyond the giant screen, the way the place is built is a draw in itself.

Inside, gold and coffee-colored round reflective panels are scattered everywhere, overlapping and interlocking, running from the ceiling down to the floor, where they turn into round benches for guests to rest on, the box office counter and the merchandise counters. Light bounces off them at different angles, so the play of light and shadow never settles.

The design was done by One Plus Partnership, a firm the designers Ajax Law and Virginia Lung founded in Hong Kong in 2004. They worked in interior design, and about eight years ago took on a movie theater for the first time. Their clients then were UA and Broadway, two of Hong Kong's big cinema chains. Palace Cinema at IFC in Shanghai's Pudong district is an early example of the firm's work on theaters.

One Plus Partnership has now designed more than 40 movie theaters. Last year alone, the theaters they designed won them 15 awards, among them Germany's iF Design Award, the Red Dot Design Award, the UK's FX Awards, Italy's IAIR Awards and Taiwan's Golden Pin Design Award. Cinema design has become the firm's core business.

Their theaters leave one impression above all: everything is built around a theme. In nearly every one, you can find a single element running through the whole space. The themes differ, but each lands hard on the eye.

At the Nanjing Yinxing Feilin Cinema (Laomendong), for example, curving red metal pipes stand in for "sound waves." Uneven in height but unbroken, they drop from the ceiling and run through the entire space, set off sharply against the gray concrete walls. The walls of each screening hall are built up out of acoustic panels into three-dimensional sound-wave patterns, in reds and grays of varying depth, answering the red pipes in the lobby.

The Mall City Cinema opened at the end of 2015 inside Xintang Vanke Plaza, Vanke's first commercial complex in Wuhan. Its theme was "taking characters apart." Starting from the most basic component of a Chinese character, the radical, the designers worked mostly in white, bending metal rods into radicals of different sizes and running them through the ceiling and walls at different angles to build a space full of layers.

"What sets a cinema apart from other public spaces is the state of mind visitors are in. Most people who go to the movies want to pull away from reality and give themselves over to the world of the film."

Talking about cinema design, Ajax Law and Virginia Lung said: "We believe the atmosphere of a cinema shapes how far the audience goes into a film. We want them to start leaving reality behind the moment they walk in — a prelude to the movie, one step at a time into the world of the film. For that, the design has to be unlike the world outside."

As they see it, beyond spending on projectors, screens and the rest, how distinctive a theater looks matters a great deal. A restaurant can offer dishes and flavors no one else has; every cinema shows the same films. So how do you get people to go out of their way to watch a movie at yours?

Designers and theater owners alike are in fact putting more thought into cinema design now. One Plus Partnership is not alone; abroad, ideas keep coming. Take Cinemaxx, the chain owned by the Indonesian conglomerate Lippo Group, which we have written about before: in Tangerang, Indonesia, it built Asia's first new-style children's cinema, Cinemaxx Junior, for children aged 3 to 10, to draw families bringing their kids along. IMAX, the film-technology company, plans to work with Odeon & UCI, Europe's largest chain, on the world's first virtual-reality experience center, in Manchester, England. The Alésia cinema in Paris turned 500 square meters of its facade into 12 LED panels showing trailers, ads and posters, so the watching starts before you reach the door.

The theater Ajax Law and Virginia Lung remember best is the Wushang Mall City Cinema in Wuhan, designed seven years ago for Hubei Yinxing. One Plus Partnership had already done five or six theaters before it, but this was the one that made their approach known. It won the firm more than 20 international awards: gold at Germany's iF Communication Design Award, making it the first Hong Kong interior design firm to take gold in the competition's 63-year history, plus the Spark International Design Award in the US, Germany's Red Dot Award and the UK's FX International Interior Design Award, among others.

In 2010, with the industry moving from film reels to digital projection, the Hubei Yinxing cinema circuit group decided to use the Wushang Mall City theater, then still being built, to remake the Yinxing brand. Until then, Yinxing's theaters — and those of the other cinemas under its parent, Hubei Changjiang Film Group — looked like everyone else's: most sat on the upper floors of shopping centers, matching whatever mall they were in, with little to set them apart and no interior design to speak of.

So Yinxing went to One Plus Partnership in Hong Kong, which had designed Palace Cinema at Shanghai IFC, and asked for a theater that would "set a style of its own."

The Wushang Mall City Cinema was finished in 2011. It runs to more than 8,000 square meters and is fitted throughout with digital projection. To echo the digital theme of the moment, the designers ran a "pixel" element through the whole space: rectangular Pixel Boxes turn up everywhere, from the lobby to the screening halls to the cultural display area, and the restrooms too.

Six years on, the theater still does not look dated. Walk in and the first thing you see is a digital concept wall, 40 meters long and 4 meters high, covered with 3,000 staggered "boxes," a few of them jutting out to spell "Pixel Box." A row of boxes protruding along the bottom of the wall doubles as seating. Past the wall is an oval hall built from more than 6,000 pieces of mirrored steel, its double-height walls set with boxes that push out at intervals to give the surface a beat. The merchandise counters in the hall are boxes of different heights, standing in for the refrigerated case, the popcorn display and the register. Even the toilet stalls were designed as freestanding boxes with their own sinks, each a different height and placed as if at random; the mirrored surfaces and the lighting give them a touch of humor.

Wushang Mall City began One Plus Partnership's work with Changjiang Film Group. Over the seven years since, the firm has designed more than 20 theaters for Changjiang Film in cities around the country, and picked up other clients along the way. Its list now also includes Jinyi, Yinxing, Bona, Xingfu Lanhai and Coastal City.

One Plus Partnership charges three times what other firms charge, and each project takes four to six months. For every theater, they draw up three different schemes, let the client choose one, then develop it. Besides settling the style, the colors and the materials, they handle everything from the theme and how it is expressed to the layout of the space: where the box office and the concession stand go, the fittings and furniture of the VIP halls, even the plan of the restrooms.

Yinxing put more than 50 million yuan into Wushang Mall City at the outset. The theater has more than 2,000 seats, and cinemas are typically built for 8,000 to 10,000 yuan a seat, so this was no small sum.

Peng Shu, deputy general manager of Changjiang Film Group, Yinxing's parent, argues that since a cinema lease usually runs 15 years, money spent on design early pays back later in operations.

The company built Wuhan's first multiplex in 1994, but its circuit only grew quickly from 2003, and from 2008 it was opening five or six theaters a year. Changjiang Film Group now has 108 theaters; beyond Hubei, its distribution and exhibition network reaches 18 provinces and municipalities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing and Shenzhen. Wushang Mall City is still the standout: for several years running it has led Hubei in both box office and admissions, taking 49 million yuan at the box office in 2016, with admissions among the top five theaters in the country.

The talk its "design" generated has helped Wushang Mall City pull in an audience. But its record should not be credited to good design alone.

The commercial setting is unusual too. The theater sits inside Wuhan Wushang Plaza, which links Wuhan International Plaza and World Trade Plaza to form the Mall City complex, one of the more upmarket of Wuhan's many complexes, with steady, heavy foot traffic. The Yinxing circuit is also strong in the Hubei market: of the 22 circuits operating in the province, Yinxing took the most at the box office, 586 million yuan in 2016, more than 200 million ahead of Wanda in second place.

Even with the advantage its home market gives it, Yinxing has had to think about doing something, as theaters and screens multiply and the competition sharpens.

Get the site, build, wait for the films to open: the cinema business is simple and direct, and it rose with the film market. Although 2016 was seen as a year of adjustment, with the films themselves doing poorly, theaters looked like a better investment than ever, and more capital came in. Bona, the private distributor, tied up with Xinhualian Holdings last October to push hard into circuits; China Film Group spent more than 500 million yuan for control of Dalian Huachen Film; Perfect World bought Jindian; Alibaba Pictures bought a star-rated cinema in Hangzhou.

As of December 20 last year, China had more screens than the United States, the most in the world. But the circuits remain fragmented: the top ten hold about 66% of the market and the top four about 40%. Wanda, in first place, took more than 5 billion yuan at the box office; China Film Xingmei, Guangdong Dadi, Shanghai Lianhe and the others behind it each took more than 3 billion.

Because producers and distributors upstream release a film across every circuit at once, with no differentiation, circuits not only show the same films but schedule them at much the same rates, and the result is a sameness that runs deep. Most moviegoers still pick a theater by distance first and showtime second; brand and surroundings count for relatively little. Unless a big-brand circuit has an edge in location, scheduling or projection technology, it does not carry much weight.

At the same time, the market in the big cities may look saturated, but the weak are still being weeded out. Compared with theaters inside large malls, small independents are being finished off by the end of ticket subsidies, and theaters with aging equipment are sinking along with the old department stores that house them. The big-brand theaters left have to compete for audiences with online-release movies, which now outnumber theatrical films several times over — more than 2,500 of them in 2016.

Because the circuits are fragmented, a company like Yinxing, built on its home market, still has room to breathe against national capital. And where the films themselves are all the same, design may be one way to stand apart.

Images: One Plus Partnership