A movie theater , picture theatre , film theater or cinema is a venue, usually a building, for viewing motion pictures ("movies" or "films").
Most movie theaters are commercial operations catering to the general public, who attend by purchasing a ticket. The movie is projected with a movie projector onto a large projection screen at the front of the auditorium. Some movie theaters are now equipped for digital cinema projection, removing the need to create and transport a physical film print.
Spelling and alternative terms
Outside of North America, most English-speaking countries use the term cinema (pronounced /ˈsɪnɨmə/ , but formerly spelt "kinema" and pronounced /ˈkɪnɨmə/ ). Both terms, as well as their derivative adjectives "cinematic" and "kinematic," ultimately derive from the Greek κινῆμα, -ατος, "movement." In these areas the term "theatre" is usually restricted to live-performance venues.
In the United States, the customary spelling is "theater", but the National Association of Theatre Owners uses the spelling "theatre" to refer to a movie theater.
Colloquial expressions, mostly used for cinemas collectively, include the silver screen , the big screen (contrasted with the "small screen" of television) and (in the United Kingdom) the pictures , the flicks , and the flea pit (or fleapit ).
A "screening room" usually refers to a small facility for viewing movies, often for the use of those involved in the production of motion pictures, or in large private residences.
History in the US
Before 1900
The first public exhibition of projected motion pictures in the United States was at Koster and Bial's Music Hall on 34th Street in New York City on April 23, 1896. However, the first "storefront theater" in the US dedicated exclusively to showing motion pictures was Vitascope Hall, established on Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana June 26, 1896—it was converted from a vacant store.
A crucial factor was Thomas Edison's decision to sell a small number of Vitascope Projectors as a business venture in April-May 1896. In the basement of the new Ellicott Square Building, Main Street, Buffalo, New York, Mitchell Mark and his brother Moe Mark added what they called Edison’s Vitascope Theater (entered through Edisonia Hall), which they opened to the general public on October 19, 1896 in collaboration with Rudolph Wagner, who had moved to Buffalo after spending several years working at the Edison laboratories. This 72-seat plush theater was designed from scratch solely to show motion pictures.
Terry Ramseye, in his book, A Million and One Nights (1926) , notes that this “was one of the earliest permanently located and exclusively motion-picture exhibitions.” According to the Buffalo News (Wednesday, November 2, 1932), "There were seats for about 90 persons and the admission was three cents. Feeble, flickering films of travel scenes were the usual fare." (The true number of seats was 72.)
1900-1919
The first permanent structure designed for screening of movies in the state of California was Tally's Electric Theater, completed in 1902 in Los Angeles. Tally's theater was a storefront within a larger building, but apparently purpose-built as a movie theater. The Great Train Robbery (1903), which was 12 minutes in length, would also give the film industry a boost.
In 1905, Pittsburgh movie theater owners Harry Davis and John Harris also established the first of what would become a popular form of movie theaters spread throughout the country, which were five-cent nickelodeon movies. In 1906, Montreal opened one of the first movie theatres in the world. An even older movie theatre -which is still in action today, according to the Guinness World Records- belonged to the Pionier Cinema, and opened as the Helios on September 26, 1909, in Szczecin, Poland (at the time of the opening it was Stettin, Germany). Nevertheless, this position was beaten in 2008 when the owners of the Korsør Biograf Teater in Korsør, Denmark, discovered that they actually operated a movie theater that opened in August 1908. They were accepted into the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest still operating movie theater the same year (to appear in the 2010 edition of the book).
In 1912, the Picture House, in Clevedon, England, opened with a charity film performance to raise funds for the victims of the Titanic disaster, and has been showing films continuously since. The 1913 opening of the Regent Theater in New York City signaled a new respectability for the medium, and the start of the two-decade heyday of American cinema design. The million dollar Mark Strand Theater at 47th Street and Broadway in New York City opened in 1914 by Mitchell Mark was the archetypical movie palace. The ornate Al Ringling Theater was the very first "Movie Palace" it was built in Baraboo, WI by Al Ringling, one of the founders of the Ringling Bros. Circus for the then incredible sum of $100,000.00. In 1915, the movie The Birth of a Nation would also pave way for feature films. By 1915, feature films were so successful that the five cent ticket admission prices would expand to ten cents, hence ending the era of nickelodeon movie theaters. Later, Los Angeles promoter Sid Grauman continued the trend of theatre-as-destination with his ornate "Million Dollar Theatre", using the same design firm as Ringling (the MDT was the first to signify its primary use for motion pictures with the "theatre" spelling), and opened on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles in 1918.
Post 1920s : modern era
In the next ten years, as movie revenues exploded, independent promoters and movie studios (who owned their own proprietary chains until an antitrust ruling in 1948) raced to build the most lavish, elaborate, attractive theatres. These forms morphed into a unique architectural genre—the movie palace —a unique and extreme architectural genre which boasted a luxurious design, a giant screen, and, beginning in 1953, stereophonic sound. The movie chains were also among the first industries to install air conditioning systems which gave the theatres an additional lure of comfort in the summer period.
Several movie studio's achieved vertical integration by acquiring and constructing theatre chains. The so-called "Big Five" theatre chains of the 1920s and 1930s were all owned by studios: Paramount, Warner, Loews (which owned Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Fox, and RKO. All were broken up as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the 1948 United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. anti-trust case.
In the 1970s, porn theatres became ubiquitous in some areas. However, the introduction of the low-cost VHS video system for home televisions has decommissioned many porno cinemas as well as many 'second-run' theatres.
People can pay to watch movies at home after a few short months following their theatrical relase, through cable television or streamed from the Internet: pay-per-view (PPV) and video on demand (VOD). Initially, home video contributed to an industry wide slump in the late 1980s (see disruptive technology), not to mention the decline of the 'Dollar Cinema' (where first-run films are pulled from circulation to play at reduced rates for the remainder of their run). The theater industry responded by building larger auditoriums with stadium seating layouts, installing more screens (to allow for more variety and more show times), upgrading sound systems and installing more amenities and higher-quality food and drink. The growing popularity of high-definition television sets, along with HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc players may also contributed to the decline in cinema attendance, although there seems to be little evidence of this at the moment. As of June 12, 2009 all US television stations started broadcasting in the digital format. This could also affect US movie theaters.
3D
3-D film is a system of presenting film images so that they appear to the v
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