Sorry, Brad Pitt. Too bad, Tom Hanks. Maybe next time, Sandra Bullock.
The face that Wisconsin movie fans see the most at the cinema isn’t any of these celebrities. It’s the Marcus Corporation President and CEO Greg Marcus, who hosts the affable pre-show commercial before every movie at a Marcus theater.
At the Cap Times Executive Breakfast Wednesday morning in The Edgewater’s Grand Ballroom, Marcus got the red carpet treatment from the 150 or so in attendance to watch him speak. The series features CEOs from around Wisconsin talking one-on-one about their companies and their industries.
“Some people might feel like they kind of know you already,” interviewer Mark Richardson told Marcus. “I've never hung out with a rock star before, but I kind of got the feeling just this morning, with people like coming up (saying), ‘Hey, let's grab a picture.’”
While the Marcus Corp.’s businesses include hotels, restaurants and real estate investments, Marcus will be forever known as “the movie guy,” as Richardson put it. Marcus Theatres owns 84 theaters in 17 states (including Marcus Point and Marcus Palace in Dane County), making it the fourth largest chain in the United States.
He’s the third generation of the Marcus family to head the company (“I came to the attention of senior management at a young age,” he quipped), and noted that the movie business has always had to deal with and adjust to challenges, starting with when his grandfather faced the invention of television.
Marcus said what connects the various businesses he oversees is that the focus is not on products, but on the experiences provided to its customers. “You all think that we’re in the hotel business or the movie business. The truth is that we’re in the memory business.
“None of your kids will say, ‘Oh, I remember when I sat on the couch and watched “The Super Mario Movie” with my parents.’ They’ll say, ‘I remember when you took me to the movies and we got popcorn.’”
An audience of about 150 people turned out at the Edgewater's Grand Ballroom to hear CEO and president of the Marcus Corporation, Greg Marcus, speak at the Cap Times Executive Breakfast.
If Marcus comes across on the big screen as a relentlessly jovial, upbeat guy, the last few years in the movie business must have sorely tested that. The COVID-19 pandemic forced all movie theaters to close for six months between March and September 2020.
When the theaters reopened, they found their streaming-service competitors had been strengthened and were threatening to make movie theaters obsolete. Panicked movie studios began releasing films direct to their own streaming services, like Disney+ or HBO Max, or releasing them both in theaters and on streaming at the same time, obliterating the exclusive theatrical window that theaters rely on for revenue.
“I used to tell people that I never go to bed wondering whether there’s going to be a hotel business,” Marcus said. “But I said I sometimes wonder, will there be a theater business? I was being a little hyperbolic.”
Fortunately, Marcus said, the new CEOs of streaming services like HBO Max are realizing that the economics of streaming, which rely solely on subscriptions, are not sustainable.
“(They’re saying) we need to go back to sequential release, we need to maximize the revenue of our IP (intellectual property),” he said. "This is not about how we innovate. This is about what Hollywood needs to do, to recognize that their best economics are sequential releases, starting with the movie theaters as a way of driving that cultural zeitgeist.”
Marcus, left, said his company is not in the movie business or the hotel business. "We're in the memory business." Marcus is interviewed by Mark Richardson, president of Unfinished Business Consulting and CEO of GigBlender.
While the hotel industry has now exceeded its revenue from where it was in 2019, the movie theater industry was still about 35% down in 2022 from where it was in 2019. But Marcus is quick to point out that the number of movies in wide release was also down about 35%, suggesting that if the movies come back, the audiences will too.
The reason, Marcus said, is that people have a hunger to come together as a community, and a movie theater offers something special to people that they can’t get on their couch at home, for all the ease and convenience.
“Streaming is TV,” he said flatly. “Going to the movies is an active, different experience. We’re losing the things that keep us together. We got 20 million people off their rear ends this weekend, and they all did the same thing.”
Marcus also named some of his favorite movies (“Animal House,” “The Terminator”) and some of his favorite directors (Christopher Nolan and Alfred Hitchcock), and his one pet peeve about the movie business he loves: The movies are often too long.
That’s also the streaming services’ fault.
“What’s happened with streaming is that every director, they don’t have a scene in their movie they don’t like,” Marcus said. “And the streaming services are like, ‘Hey, make it as long as you want. We don’t care.’ And then when they want to release it theatrically, the director says, ‘You’ve got to do it as long as I want it.’ The truth is that you can edit 20 minutes out of almost any movie.”
