New book The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians by Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar digs into all kinds of market concentration in Canada—including where you watch movies on the big screen.
While Ticketmaster is an obvious target for consumer ire, we have our own home-grown chokepoint and cultural gatekeeper in Canada that receives far less attention: the movie chain and distributor Cineplex. […]
Cineplex is the largest cinema chain in Canada and has about 75 percent of the Canadian movie theatre box office market share (with 400-plus screens). No comparable monopoly exists elsewhere in the world; in the United States, the UK, and Australia, no single theatre chain has more than 30 percent of the market. Cineplex’s market power is so significant, it likely makes even our Big Banks jealous. Canada’s five major banks—Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Bank), Scotiabank, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), and the Bank of Montreal (BMO)—together control about 85 percent of their market, slightly more than Cineplex commands alone.
Here at NICE, we have long been clear that Cineplex’s market dominance and the way this affects the application of ‘zones’ has seriously shaped Canada’s cinema landscape. Canadian independent cinemas face barriers that independent cinemas in other countries do not. You can learn more about zones and how they impact independent cinemas here and here.
The Big Fix delves into the history of how access to film in Canada was not always shaped this way. In fact, the book pulls an interesting (and dare we say ironic) quote from the court settlement of a case brought by the Cineplex Odeon Corporation: “market forces will now be able to determine which theatre will play a picture rather than long-standing arrangements.”
Access to films in Canada hasn’t always been dominated by Cineplex. Back in the 1980s, a small, fledgling Canadian-owned theatre chain called Cineplex Odeon Corporation struggled to gain a foothold in a market dominated by national giant Famous Players and a regional monopoly in eastern Canada known as the Empire Chain. To address anti-competitive behaviour in the Canadian film industry, the Ontario government attempted to break up the Famous Players monopoly in 1984. The resulting court settlement transformed the Canadian film distribution landscape. This settlement, celebrated by the Government of Canada in a press release, declared that “market forces will now be able to determine which theatre will play a picture rather than long-standing arrangements.” The investigation came about due to an application by none other than Cineplex. Today’s monopolist was yesterday’s upstart underdog.
The publisher’s summary of The Big Fix recounts how this market consolidation takes places across Canadian industries:
More and more of the Canadian economy is dominated by a handful of huge companies that control what we buy, how we work, and which other businesses can or can’t thrive.
Beyond the obvious examples of airlines, telcos, grocery chains and banks, The Big Fix shows how corporate concentration is growing across many industries, leading to higher prices for consumers, lower worker’s wages, more inequality, fewer startups, less innovation and lower growth and productivity.
In this galvanizing book, Hearn and Bednar show how companies perpetuate the illusion of rivalry to disguise their dominance, and how they’ve shifted from competing within industries to accumulating assets across industries, further entrenching their power. The authors coach readers on how to think about competition, how markets are made and remade, and how the right set of attitudes and policies reduce corporate power and rebalance it throughout the economy.
From the book, authors Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar recount that consolidation in film exhibition is not just a matter of dollars and cents:
Monopolized film doesn’t just harm independent theatres and smaller production houses. It turns what could be a vibrant and diverse film and music industry into a boring, monopolized monoculture. This is how culture flattens and dulls, making it more difficult for diverse stories and voices to inform our national identity as Canadians.
Don’t miss this engaging and sometimes shocking book from Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar. We recommend picking up a copy at your local independent bookstore—perhaps The Bookshelf in Guelph, ON, which also operates an independent cinema!
